Molecular description of the collapse of hydrophobic polymer chains in water.

We propose a self-consistent molecular theory of conformational properties of flexible polymers in solution. It is applied to the collapse of a hydrophobic polymer chain in water, and can be readily generalized to any polymer-solvent system (e.g., copolymers with high complexity). We stress the potential of this method for a variety of problems, such as protein folding. Copyright 2004 American Institute of Physics