11
THE WORLDWIDE PROTEIN DATA BANK
INTRODUCTION
The Protein Data Bank was established at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) (Bernstein et al., 1977) in 1971 as an archive for biological macromolecular crystal structures. It represents one of the earliest community-driven molecular biology data collections. In the beginning, the archive held seven structures, and with each passing year a handful more were deposited. In the 1980s, the number of deposited structures began to increase dramatically. This was due to the improvements in technology for all aspects of the crystallographic process, the addition of structures determined by other methods, and changes in community views about data sharing. By the early 1990s, many journals required a PDB ID forpublication; now, virtually all journals require not only coordinates but also the primary experimental data be deposited with the PDB. As of December 2, 2008, the archive contained 54559 structures.
The initial goal of the PDB was to archive author-submitted structures determined by X-ray crystallography. Today, structures are deposited in the PDB that have been determined using X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and, most recently, cryo-electron microscopy (cryoEM). In addition to the structural biologists who deposit data, the majority of PDB users are a diverse group of researchers in the biomedical sciences (biologists, chemists, physicists, ...
