The PDB has a new home

On Oct. 1, 1998 the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB), a consortium composed of Rutgers, the State U. of New Jersey; U. of California San Diego/San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC); and the National Inst. of Standards and Technology (NIST), received a five-year award to manage the Protein Data Bank (PDB). The project will run under a Cooperative Agreement from the National Science Foundation (NSF), with funding from that agency as well as the Dept. of Energy, and two units of the National Institutes of Health: the National Inst. of General Medical Sciences and the National Library of Medicine.

The RCSB has created a system with higher, faster throughput of deposited data; a greater number of query capabilities, including more complex and specific queries; a uniform archive; dynamic cross-links to other databases; and the availability of structure and sequence neighboring. The PDB data will be stored and mirrored at all three RCSB sites and at key sites worldwide. 

Principal investigator H. Berman heads the RCSB team at Rutgers which includes J. Westbrook, who has played a key role in the development of the mmCIF dictionary. At the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UCSD, P. Bourne leads a group of scientists in a Biological Data Representation and Query initiative. Together with P. Arzberger, a computational biologist and Executive Director of NPACI, this group will be responsible for all aspects of data query and distribution. G.L. Gilliland, chief of the Biotechnology Div. in NIST's Chemical Science and Technology Lab, will lead the NIST effort to establish data uniformity, improve the accessibility and reliability of queries, and manage the Master Archive. 

The RCSB is working with the Brookhaven National Laboratories (BNL) team headed by J. Sussman to ensure that there is a seamless transition that will be completed by Oct. 31, 1999. A website (http://www.rcsb.org) has been established to provide up to date transition information and to provide access to the new features of the system as they become available.