Water plays a quite important role in chemical and biological processes, such as acid-base reactions, [1,2] proton transfer in membrane proteins, [3][4][5] keto-enol tautomerization, [6] and the hydration of carbonyl compounds. The hydration of carbonyl compounds has a long standing interest, both experimentally [7][8][9][10] and theoretically. [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] In most reactions of carbonyl compounds, such as aldehydes, ketones, esters, amides, the carboxylic acids, and their derivatives, the initial hydration or the nucleophilic addition of water at the carbonyl group, leading to a tetrahedral intermediate, is the rate-determining step. For example, the neutral hydrolyses of carboxylic acid derivatives normally proceed through the addition-elimination mechanism, [9] in which the hydration of the carbonyl group to yield a tetrahedral intermediate is the key step for hydrolysis.For the hydration of carbonyl compounds, all the previous ab-initio calculations proposed a concerted mechanism for the rate-determining hydration step, [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] including the nucleophilic attack of one water molecule onto the carbonyl carbon atom coupled with the concerted proton transfer to the carbonyl oxygen atom assisted by one or more water molecules as shown in Scheme 1. However, most of the calculated Gibbs free energies of activation (DG°) for the concerted mechanism exceed the experimental value considerably, [23] although calculations with a relatively small basis set happen to predict activation energies comparable to the experimental value. This unexpected agreement between theory and experiment can be ascribed to use of relatively small basis set (see below). In a recent study the initial water autoionization was assumed to be involved in the hydrolysis of esters, [23] and the predicted Gibbs activation energies by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations for the key steps are comparable to DG°of 23.8 kcal mol À1 for the water autoionization, [24] in agreement with the experimental value of 26.1 kcal mol À1 .[25] However, in this mechanism the water autoionization as the rate-determining step is a prerequisite to hydrolysis, implying that the Gibbs free energies of activation (DG°) are little changed for different esters.Nevertheless, the experimental rate constants for the hydration of esters can vary by 10 7 fold, which approximately corresponds to an activation energy difference of 10 kcal mol À1 . Experimental studies by Bell et al. suggested that the hydration of the carbonyl group may proceed through a stepwise transfer of three protons in a cyclic array of three water molecules, [26] and that an intermediate Eigen ion (H 3 O + ) [27] is most likely involved in hydration. However, to date, there is no computational evidence for H 3 O + as the key intermediate. This situation may arise from the use of inappropriate cluster models for hydrated species in previous computational studies. Theoretical calculations on the Gibbs free energy of hydration for the proton sh...