ArticleJournal of the American Chemical Society2025
Unraveling the Molecular Pathways for Structure "Making" and "Breaking" by Ions in Water.
Article in Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Specific Ion Effects of Chaotropic and Superchaotropic Anions Probed by Raman Hydration-Shell Spectroscopy.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2026Article
- Lipid-Substrate Interactions Lead to Bilayer Asymmetry.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2026Article
- Structure making and breaking in electrolyte solutions explained by water energetics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Aqueous anions play a crucial role in chemical and biological processes. They are traditionally classified as "structure makers" or "structure breakers" based on their impact on the viscosity of electrolyte solutions. Until now, this behavior has been assumed to stem from a single restructuring mechanism of the hydrogen (H) bonding network of water, that could align with macroscopic properties. Correlated Vibrational Spectroscopy (CVS) measurements reveal that this is not the case. Rather, anions modify water-water H-bonds through multiple distinct pathways, with frequency shifts correlating with charge transfer, and intensity changes quantifying variations in the number of interacting/orientationally cross-correlated H-bonds. The different ways through which anions impact water structure can be explained in terms of Hard-Soft-Acid-Base theory. Hard anions only affect water H-bonds through electrostatics. By contrast, soft anions weaken the H-bonds via charge transfer but simultaneously increase their concentration. The two effects for soft anions nearly cancel each other out in terms of structure breaking/making, resulting in macroscopic behavior that is similar to hard anions in spite of dramatically different molecular-level effects.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.