Protein folding using Monte Carlo derived techniques and implicit solvation

References where an implicit solvation model has been necessary? I'm not sure any Rosetta publication will treat the necessity of using implicit solvation models. All Rosetta calculations are done with implicit solvation. Rosetta isn't set up to do explicit solvation, and comparing implicit versus explicit solvation isn't really something that a Rosetta-based protocol would do.

The best you're likely to come up with regarding the necessity of implicit solvation is to find some (non-Rosetta) references which talk about how a particular protein is hard to fold with explicit solvation, and then hope to find a Rosetta paper which shows how the implicit solvation Rosetta model can handle it. (The CASP exercises might be good for that - you could find a group using explicit solvation models, look at the targets they do poorly on, and then see if Rosetta does better.) That's comparing apples to oranges, though. Rosetta takes a completely different approach to folding proteins than does a molecular mechanics based approach (which is likely what you'd get for a method using explicit solvation). It would be hard to say if it's the implicit solvation per se which makes the problem tractable, or if it would be Rosetta's fragment-based approach instead.

Perhaps if you elaborated on the reasoning behind your request I could think of some suggestions which might be useful.