New Trends in Hydrostatic Pressure Spectroscopy towards from Molecules to Living Cells

Hydrostatic pressure is one of the fundamental and significant external stimuli, and thus, has attracted attention in synthetic chemistry and photo-physical and -chemical processes. In considering weak interaction systems such as biological and supramolecular reactions on the basis of thermodynamics, enthalpy and entropy changes exquisitely keep the balance each other according to the enthalpy-entropy compensation law, meaning that it seems to be difficult to control reactions/rates by only either of these parameters. On the other hand, reaction/activation volume change (DV)-based hydorstatic pressure (P) control turns out to be an alternative to the conventional control method. In this review, we wish to report our recent hydrostatic pressure-spectroscopic results on DV as solvation, conformational change, molecular recognition, and biological reaction. [hydrostatic pressure, spectroscopy, conformational change, solvation, molecular recognition, photophysics]