Crystallographic structure models in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) are optimized against the crystal diffraction data and geometrical restraints. This process of crystallographic refinement typically ignored hydrogen bond (H-bond) distances as a source of information. However, H-bond restraints can improve structures, especially at low resolution where diffraction data are limited.To improve low-resolution structure refinement, we present methods for deriving H-bond information either globally from well-refined high-resolution structures from the PDB-REDO databank, or specifically from on-the-fly constructed sets of homologous high-resolution structures. Refinement incorporating HOmology DErived Restraints (HODER), improves geometrical quality and the fit to the diffraction data for many low-resolution structures. Using approximately 60 years of CPU-time in massively parallel computing, we constructed a new instance of the PDB-REDO databank, a novel resource to help biologists gain insight on protein families or on specific structures, as we demonstrate with examples.All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.(which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.The copyright holder for this preprint . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/147231 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jun. 7, 2017; 3 Crystallographic structure models are optimized against the crystallographic diffraction data and a priori known geometrical observations, the geometrical restraints. We are developing the PDB-REDO procedure, which among many decisions 1 optimizes the weight between crystallographic and geometrical observations 2 to re-refine and re-build macromolecular structures before 3 or after they are submitted to the PDB 4 . In PDB-REDO and any crystallographic refinement procedure however, low resolution diffraction data means that fewer observations of diffracted X-rays are available, and as resolution declines the crystallographic refinement problem becomes increasingly underdetermined
5. Restraint dictionaries 6,7 describing 'ideal' refinement targets for bond lengths, angles, planar groups and other well-defined chemical features, at low resolution become gradually insufficient to yield high-quality structure models. Additional, external restraints 8 can be defined and, for example, hydrogen bond restraints 9,10 (H-bonds) andRamachandran torsion angle restraints 9,11 have been used to enhance protein secondary structure quality, particularly at lower resolution.Macromolecular crystals diffract X-rays to higher or lower resolution in an unpredictable manner:even very similar proteins or the same protein bound to different ligands (e.g. drug candidates), can yield crystallographic data at different resolutions. This allows refinement methods to harvest information from a high-resolution "reference" model and use it to refine low-resolution models 9,10,[12][13][14][15] . Available implementations of this principle focus on harvesting restrai...