The properties of water in biological systems have been studied for well over a century by a wide range of physical techniques, but progress has been slow and erratic. Protein hydration--the perturbation of water structure and dynamics by the protein surface--has been a particularly rich source of controversy and confusion. Our aim here is to critically examine central concepts in the descripti...

CONTEXT In the U.S., patients with advanced cancer who are dehydrated or have decreased oral intake almost always receive parenteral hydration in acute care facilities but rarely in the hospice setting. OBJECTIVES To describe the meaning of hydration for terminally ill cancer patients in home hospice care and for their primary caregivers. METHODS Phenomenological interviews were conducted a...

Standard methods for behavioral and neurophysiological experiments in the non-human primate rely on controlled water access as a means for motivating subject performance. It is, however, still not clear whether animals are able to regulate their fluid balance appropriately under these experimental settings. Further, the physical state associated with a subject monkey's thirst has not yet been o...

A systematic computational approach to An(III) hydration on a density-functional level of theory, using quasi-relativistic 5f-in-core pseudopotentials and valence-only basis sets for the An(III) subsystems, is presented. Molecular structures, binding energies, hydration energies, and Gibbs free energies of hydration have been calculated for [An(III)(OH(2))(h)](3+) (h = 7, 8, 9) and [An(III)(OH(...

Hydration of bilayer lipids is a fundamental property of biological membranes. The available database of lipid hydration isotherms is fitted over the entire range of water activities by using a statistical mechanical approach that is an extension of the common Brunauer-Emmett-Teller model, to include differential energies of association for water molecules beyond the first strongly bound layer....

-Smectites synthesized from experiments at 5.5 GPa and 1500~ are of high quality, crystals are large at >10 p~m, and the 2:1 layers may have a homogeneous charge distribution. Smectite was exchanged with various cations (Na + , Li +, K +, Ca 2+, and Mg z+) and the hydration behavior of each sample was observed by an in situ powder X-ray diffraction method under precisely controlled relative hum...

We report the effect of changes in the corneal hydration on the refractive index of the cornea. Using optical coherence tomography (OCT), the geometrical thickness and the group refractive index of the bovine cornea were derived simultaneously as the corneal hydration was varied. The corneal hydration was then calculated from the corneal thickness. The group refractive index of the cornea incre...

Computer study via molecular mechanics and Monte Carlo methods reveals some interesting features of hydration of nucleic acid bases. The calculations of interactions of one water molecule with each of bases allow to find the sites of preferential hydration. The energy of interactions with some sites is changing upon Watson-Crick pair formation. Hydration of all the H-bonded base pairs is less f...

What role does water play in the self-assembly of soft materials? To understand the correlation between the hydration state and the various self-assembled structures of a nonionic surfactant, terahertz time-domain spectroscopy has been performed for a C(12)E(5) solution with complementary use of small-angle x-ray scattering. Precise observations of the hydration state show clearly that transiti...

The hydration thermodynamics of the GXG tripeptide relative to the reference GGG is often used to define the conditional hydration contribution of X. This quantity or the hydration thermodynamics of a small molecule analog of the side-chain or some combination of such estimates, usually including factors to account for the solvent-exposure of the side-chain in the protein, have anchored the int...