27-Jan-2004
Protein Data Bank Opens New Era With Broader Support
The National Science Foundation has just announced a five-year renewal
of funding for the PDB under the management of the RCSB. NSF has
supported the PDB continuously since 1975, and a multi-agency support
partnership first formed in 1989. For the past five years, that
partnership has included NSF, the National Institute of General
Medical Sciences (NIGMS), the Department of Energy (DOE) and the
National Library of Medicine (NLM). The partnership has been expanded
now to include the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National
Center for Research Resources (NCRR), the National Institute of
Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), and the National
Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).
The new support agreement, which began Jan. 1, calls for the PDB to
continue to be managed by three members of the Research Collaboratory
for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB): Rutgers, The State University of
New Jersey; the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of
California, San Diego; and the University of Maryland/National
Institute of Standards and Technology's Center for Advanced Research
in Biotechnology. This new era for PDB opens following the recent
announcement of the wwPDB (http://www.wwpdb.org), an
international agreement to coordinate the deposition and distribution
of molecular structure data.
The PDB has continued to grow and to evolve since its inception in
1971: last year, more than 4,600 new molecular structures were added,
and, on an average day, visitors downloaded various structural files
more than 120,000 times. Over the next five years, the PDB will meet
challenges that include the expanded integration of its information
with other biological resources, keeping up with the increasing
complexity and volume of deposited structures, meeting the demands for
more complex queries, and providing more detailed annotation of the
experiments and the structures. PDB also will also continue to serve
an ever-expanding, diverse and global user community.
The NSF announcement is available at
http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/04/pr0408.htm,
along with these related materials:
A chronology of PDB and Structural Biology milestones -
http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/04/fstimeline_pdb_04.htm
Examples and impacts of PDB structures -
http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/04/fspdb_examples.htm
Images of PDB structures -
http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/04/pr0408_images.htm
RCSB PDB, wwPDB and U.S. federal agency contacts -
http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/04/fscontacts_pdb_04.htm
