RCSB - History

History

Two forces converged to initiate the PDB: 1) a small but growing collection of sets of protein structure data determined by X-ray diffraction; and 2) the newly available (1968) molecular graphics display, the Brookhaven RAster Display (BRAD), to visualize these protein structures in 3-D. In 1969, with the sponsorship of Dr. Walter Hamilton at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Dr. Edgar Meyer (Texas A&M University) began to write software to store atomic coordinate files in a common format to make them available for geometric and graphical evaluation. By 1971, one of Dr. Meyer's programs, SEARCH, enabled researchers to remotely access information from the database to study protein structures offline. SEARCH was instrumental in enabling networking, thus marking the functional beginning of the PDB.

Upon Hamilton's death in 1973, Dr. Tom Koeztle took over direction of the PDB for the subsequent 20 years. In January 1994, Dr. Joel Sussman of Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science was appointed head of the PDB. In October 1998, the PDB was transferred to the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB); the transfer was completed in June 1999. The new director was Dr. Helen M. Berman of Rutgers University (one of the member institutions of the RCSB). In 2003, with the formation of the wwPDB, the PDB became an international organization. The founding members are PDBe (Europe), RCSB(USA), and PDBj (Japan). The BMRB joined in 2006. Each of the four members of wwPDB can act as deposition, data processing and distribution centers for PDB data. The data processing refers to the fact that wwPDB staff review and annotates each submitted entry. The data are then automatically checked for plausibility (the source code for this validation software has been made available to the public at no charge).