Abstract

The Protein Data Bank (PDB; http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/ ) is the single worldwide archive of structural data of biological macromolecules. This paper describes the goals of the PDB, the systems in place for data deposition and access, how to obtain further information, and near-term plans for the future development of the resource. INTRODUCTION The Protein Data Bank (PDB) was established at Brookhaven National Laboratories (BNL) (1) in 1971 as an archive for biological macromolecular crystal structures. In the beginning the archive held seven structures, and with each year a handful more were deposited. In the 1980s the number of deposited structures began to increase dramatically. This was due to the improved technology for all aspects of the crystallographic process, the addition of structures determined by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods, and changes in the community views about data sharing. By the early 1990s the majority of journals required a PDB accession code and at le...

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