Dear Pavel,
              
              yes, such an exact prediction of ordered water molecules
              might be very helpful. I was sure that somebody else had
              this idea already. 
              I was playing around with a few datasets truncated a low
              resolution (3.5 - 4.0 A) and then compared Rwork/Rfree
              using an input model with and without water molecules.
              Clearly the water molecules had a large contribution in
              the refinement of  these artificially truncated datasets.
              Sascha pointed me to an example in your paper from 2002:
              
              Lunin, V.Y., Afonine, P. & Urzhumtsev, A.G. (2002)
              "Likelihood-based refinement. 1. Irremovable model
              errors.". Acta Cryst., A58, 270-282. 
              
              I had a look into the  literature to get an idea and found
              several programs evaluating the inner shell water
              molecules and some programs predicting water positions. I
              had a try only on a few programs. I found that a nice
              summary is given in the publication on an approach called
              WaterDock:
              
              Ross GA, Morris GM, Biggin PC (2012) "Rapid and accurate
              prediction and scoring of water molecules in protein
              binding sites." PLoS One 7(3):e32036. 
              
              But before analyzing many structures and see whether it
              might work in general,  my aim is much simpler. I have
              high resolution structures of with water molecules and try
              to implement the ordered water molecules into the
              refinement of a protein complex at low resolution. My
              approach was maybe a bit of naive so far but I am sure
              there is good way to do that. 
              
              Best wishes, Guenter
              
            
            
              Hello,
              
              I tried this idea back in 2004. In a nutshell: using all
              (or categorized subset of) structures in PDB we can learn
              about distribution of structured water and given this
              knowledge we can build an a priori contribution of
              scattering arising from such water to the scattering of
              any given new structure or a structure at low resolution
              (where the water is not visible in maps).
              
              Either I did not spend enough time on this or the idea
              wasn't viable, but one way or another this did not work in
              my hands. I think it may be worth revisiting this 10 years
              later! Perhaps I would do it better now than back then!
              
              All the best,
              Pavel
              
              On 11/16/14 2:19 PM,
                Nathaniel Echols wrote:
              
              
                I will leave it to others to debate the
                  wisdom of this strategy, but to answer the purely
                  technical question: