How protein chemists learned about the hydrophobic factor

Abstract

It is generally accepted today that the hydrophobic force is the dominant energetic factor that leads to the folding of polypeptide chains into compact globular entities. This principle was first explicitly introduced to protein chemists in 1938 by Irving Langmuir, past master in the application of hydrophobicity to other problems, and was enthusiastically endorsed by J.D. Bernal. But both proposal and endorsement came in the course of a debate about a quite different structural principle, the so-called "cyclol hypothesis" proposed by D. Wrinch, which soon proved to be theoretically and experimentally unsupportable. Being a more tangible idea, directly expressed in structural terms, the cyclol hypothesis received more attention than the hydrophobic principle and the latter never actually entered the mainstream of protein science until 1959, when it was thrust into the limelight in a lucid review by W. Kauzmann. A theoretical paper by H.S. Frank and M. Evans, not itself related to protein folding, probably played a major role in the acceptance of the hydrophobicity concept by protein chemists because it provided a crude but tangible picture of the origin of hydrophobicity per se in terms of water structure.