Cross-posted from pdb-l --Gerard
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:35:10 -0500 From: Christine Zardecki <zarde...@rcsb.rutgers.edu> To: pd...@rcsb.org Subject: pdb-l: From 7 to 70,000: The PDB Reaches a New Milestone
From 7 to 70,000: The PDB Reaches a New Milestone
As the year 2010 draws to a close, the number of biomacromolecular structures available in the PDB archive now exceeds 70,000.
The PDB is the single, global archive for information about the 3D structure of biomacromolecules and their complexes, as determined by X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy and cryo-electron microscopy, and includes more than a few Nobel Prize-winning structures. The number of entries available was only seven when the PDB was founded -- with great foresight -- at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1971. A symposium to celebrate the 40th anniversary of this invaluable resource will be held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in October 2011.
Since 2003, the PDB archive has been operated by the Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB) collaboration of organizations that act as deposition, data processing and distribution centers for PDB data. The wwPDB members are RCSB PDB (USA), PDBe (UK), PDBj (Japan), and the BMRB (USA). These organizations are the only sites that accept depositions of new biomacromolecular structures and associated experimental data. wwPDB partners also collaborate on issues of policy, formats, standards, curation procedures and validation, and are currently developing a complex new software system to meet the future demands of structure deposition and annotation. The work of the wwPDB organization is guided by an Advisory Board, with representatives of the various stakeholder communities.
Today, wwPDB partners receive approximately 25 new structure depositions per day. In 2010, more than 260 million data files were downloaded or viewed online at wwPDB partner sites. Users include structural biologists, computational biologists, biochemists, molecular biologists, and other scientists in academia, government and industry (including pharmaceutical, chemical, and biotechnology companies). PDB data are also used by educators and students for furthering their understanding of biology.
Worldwide PDB: http://www.wwpdb.org/
