January 21, 2004

Expanded Federal Support and Global Collaboration for PDB

The Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB), co-directed by CARB's Gary Gilliland, is a non-profit consortium dedicated to improving our understanding of the function of biological systems through the study of the 3-D structure of biological macromolecules. The Protein Data Bank (PDB), originally established in 1971 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been managed by RCSB since 1998.

NSF has supported the Protein Data Bank continuously since 1975. For the past five years, federal support of PDB was provided by NSF, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The partnership supporting PDB has been expanded now to include the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).

Growing support for PDB is not limited to federal agencies. RCSB recently "went global" by establishing the worldwide Protein Data Bank wwPDB) in partnership with 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.

The expansion of federal agency partnerships and international participation mirrors the expansion in opportunities for progress in a new era of structure-informed research.

For more details on this story and links to information about RCSB and the PDB, visit http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/04/pr0408.htm.

More information on the newly formed worldwide Protein Data Bank is available at http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/newsletter/2003q4/wwpdb.html.

The University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute was mandated by the state of Maryland legislature in 1985 as “a new paradigm of state economic development in biotech-related sciences.” With five major research and education centers across Maryland, UMBI is dedicated to advancing the frontiers of biotechnology. The centers are the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology in Rockville; Center for Biosystems Research in College Park; and Center of Marine Biotechnology, Medical Biotechnology Center, and the Institute of Human Virology, all in Baltimore.