The Worldwide Protein Data Bank contains a record 100,000+ structures

It seems only fitting that the Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB) celebrates reaching 100,000+ entries during the International Year of Crystallography. 

This central public archive has achieved this critical milestone thanks to the sterling efforts of structural biologists throughout the world who share their experimentally determined protein and nucleic acid structure data.

Starting from just 7 protein crystal structures in 1971, the PDB archive has grown rapidly over the past 43 years. In recent years, the number of structures being submitted has increased enormously; for example, in 2012 almost 10,000 new structures were deposited, which represents more than the total deposited in the first 25 years of the PDB’s life.

In 2003 the way in which the PDB archive was managed was transformed by the founding of the wwPDB organization. Made up of four partners [Research Collaboratory for Structural Bio-informatics Protein Data Bank (RCSB PDB), BioMagResBank (BMRB), Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) and the Protein Data Bank Japan (PDBj)], the wwPDB ensures entries are truly international, archived appropriately and remain easily accessible to the widest possible number of scientists worldwide.

Each of the partner sites act as a mini deposition, processing and distribution centre for the PDB content, working as a combined unit (and with the community at large) to define deposition and annotation policies, file formats and validation standards for structural data.

Whatever new challenges the next 10 years may bring, the wwPDB and the community remain committed to maintaining high standards of quality, integrity and consistency of the macromolecular structure archive and to making it freely available to an increasingly large and diverse group of scientists.