Abstract
The Protein Data Bank (PDB) has grown from a small data resource for crystallographers to a worldwide resource serving structural biology. The history of the growth of the PDB and the role that the community has played in developing standards and policies are described. This article also illustrates how other biophysics communities are collaborating with the worldwide PDB to create a network of interoperating data resources. This network will expand the capabilities of structural biology and enable the determination and archiving of increasingly complex structures.
Highlights
Crystallographers have a long tradition of effective data management practices
Perhaps the requirement for ordered crystals carries over into a need for ordered results. Perhaps it is a consequence of the fact that crystallographic experiments generate large volumes of data, yielding definitive results that are utilized by many other scientists
The Protein Data Bank (PDB) has evolved from a data archive for biological macromolecular crystal structures to a resource for all structural biology methods. We describe this evolution with an emphasis on how the community has
Summary
Crystallographers have a long tradition of effective data management practices. It is intriguing to speculate on the origins of these practices. The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) took a leadership role in promoting data standards; one of the stated objectives of the IUCr is ‘to facilitate standardization of methods, units, nomenclatures and symbols’ (https://www.iucr.org). This high level of standardization has enabled us to efficiently turn the relatively high volume of data produced by crystallographic experiments first into information, and into knowledge. Another objective of the IUCr ‘to promote international cooperation in crystallography’, beyond creating the necessary standards, created a framework for data sharing. IUCrJ (2020). 7, 630–638 worked together to develop standards and policies for data sharing
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