The Protein Data Bank now holds more than 100,000 entries, says Ward Smith, the chief of the Structural Genomics and Proteomics Technology Branch at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, in a post at the NIGMS Feedback Loop Blog.
The repository was established in 1971 at Brookhaven National Laboratory by Walter Hamilton and contained information on just seven structures. The PDB, which has been funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1978, now includes atomic-level data on 100,326 structures.
Smith adds that researchers from around the work deposit some 200 structures a week that are then reviewed, annotated, and improved with links to related data by PDB staff.
"PDB is widely used by the scientific community to study basic biological processes like transcription, translation, enzymology, bioenergetics, and metabolism and also for more medically oriented investigations into disease mechanisms and drug design," he says.