[3dem] From 7 to 70,000: The PDB Reaches a New Milestone (fwd)

[Gerard DVD Kleywegt]

Cross-posted from pdb-l

--Gerard


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:35:10 -0500
From: Christine Zardecki <zardecki at rcsb.rutgers.edu>
To: pdb-l at 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/