50,000 structures in the PDB
The Protein Data Bank is one of the premier examples of free and open access to scientific data. It was started in 1971 as a place to house structural data on proteins, and since then has grown tremendously.
This month (possibly today or tomorrow if they continue at their normal rate) they will hit 50,000 structures. The PDB has actually seen explosive growth recently, doubling in size in less than 4 years, and is projected to triple in size again over 6 more years. This is largely due to the nascent field of high-throughput proteomics, in which scientists attempt to solve as many structures as they can as rapidly as possible, often without worrying about what the protein actually does.
All of the structures in the PDB are free for anyone to download, and deposition is fairly straightforward as well. They have done a good job updating the site to make searching for the molecule of interest relatively simple. I feel like more could be done to indicate differences in cases where you have many structures of a single protein, but at some point this becomes an editorial burden that I’m not sure they want to carry.
So, congratulations to the PDB are in order. I’ll celebrate by pointing you to the structure that really got me into biochemistry, alpha-hemolysin
