CG Model. We considered a Au144(SR)60 NP, R being either a hydrophobic octanethiol ligand (OT) or an anionic 11-mercaptoundecanesulfonate (MUS). The diameter of the Au core is about 2 nm (Supporting Figure S1), while the monolayer-protected NP has an overall diameter of about 4 nm. We modeled the Au–Au and Au–S interactions using an elastic network, while we developed a CG model of the ligands based on the popular Martini force field(20) (Figure 1). At CG level, the OT ligands are modeled as a chain of two hydrophobic (type C1) beads. The MUS ligands are described by three hydrophobic beads (Martini type C1) and one negatively charged terminal bead (type Qda). The details of the parametrization can be found in the Supporting Information. We remark here that our CG description does not distinguish between, e.g., mercaptoundecanoic acid and mercaptoundecanesulfonate, allowing for the direct comparison with several independent previous computational (AA) and experimental works.