Announcing the worldwide Protein Data Bank

In recognition of the growing international and interdisciplinary nature of structural biology, three organizations have formed a collaboration to oversee the newly formed worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB; http://www.wwpdb.org/). The Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB), the Macromolecular Structure Database (MSD) at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and the Protein Data Bank Japan (PDBj) at the Institute for Protein Research in Osaka University will serve as custodians of the wwPDB, with the goal of maintaining a single archive of macromolecular structural data that is freely and publicly available to the global community.

The wwPDB represents a milestone in the evolution of the Protein Data Bank (PDB; http://www.pdb.org/)^1,2 , which was established in 1971 at Brookhaven National Laboratory as the sole international repository for three-dimensional structure data of biological macromolecules. Since July 1, 1999, the PDB has been managed by three member institutions of the RSCB: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego; and the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

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