Features and Highlights

Fifty-five years of collaborative open-access structural biology

10/05

Celebrating 55 years of the PDB

On October 20th, the wwPDB will celebrate the 55th anniversary of the launch of the Protein Data Bank by streaming presentations from leading structural biologists.

The wwPDB Foundation has partnered with the International Union of Crystallography to enable broadcasting (and on-demand streaming) of select presentations from the 2026 Triennial Congress:

Webinar

From mechanism to inhibitors: Controlling deubiquitinating enzymes in cells
(Cynthia Wolberger, Johns Hopkins University)
Registration required

Streaming (details to be announced):

Human neutralizing antibodies against Measles virus from an MMR vaccine
(Erica Ollmann Saphire, La Jolla Institute for Immunology)
Making sense of invisible density in single particle cryo-EM
(Yifan Cheng, University of California San Francisco and Howard Hughes Medical Institute)
Decoding conformational ensembles to leverage entropy for function and design
(Stephanie A. Wankowicz, Vanderbilt University and Radial, Astera Institute)

The wwPDB is very grateful for these contributed presentations.

Additional partner-hosted events will be announced.

Celebrating 55 Years of Open Access to PDB Data

The PDB is the global archive for biological structures. From its inception, the PDB has embraced a culture of open access, leading to its widespread use by the research community and public alike. Many millions of users access the PDB data exploring fundamental biology, biomedicine, biotechnology, and the energy sciences.

The wwPDB partnership was established in July 2003 with PDBe, PDBj, and RCSB PDB. Today, the collaboration includes partners BMRB (joined in 2006) and EMDB (2021).

The wwPDB ensures that these valuable atomic coordinate and experimental supporting data are securely stored, expertly managed, and made freely available for the benefit of scientists and educators around the globe. wwPDB data centers work closely with community experts to define deposition and annotation policies, resolve data representation issues, and implement community validation standards. In addition, the wwPDB works to raise the profile of structural biology with increasingly broad audiences.

Structural biology archived in the PDB opens windows into biology. Through their structures, scientists not only can understand how biological molecules work but can design many of our modern medicines. Structural biology has been seminal in our understanding of SARS-CoV-2, and is the foundation of our understanding of protein folding. The enormous wealth of 3D structure data stored in the PDB led to recent breakthroughs in protein structure prediction accelerated by artificial intelligence approaches and deep or machine learning methods.

Most scientific journals require deposition of structural biology data in the PDB prior to publication. The PDB data are readily accessible to scientists, educators and nonscientists alike.

The importance of sharing structural biology data for systems biology, protein design and drug discovery will continue to open our world into the intricacies of biology.