RESPONSIBILITY FOR PROTEIN DATA BANK SHIFTS 3 MONTHS EARLY.

Responsibility for the Protein Data Bank has formally shifted from Brookhaven National Laboratory to the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics three months ahead of schedule. The RCSB is a joint collaboration between NIST, Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, and the University of California, San Diego. The PDB can be accessed on the World Wide Web at nist.rcsb.org/index.html.

The non-profit international archive for bio-molecular structures used in pharmaceutical and medical research, PDB has provided substantial improvements in service during the past few months. Since the RCSB began assuming responsibility for the PDB, data deposited by users have been turned around in record time, and new tools now provide a broader range of search and reporting options. The success of these developments has accelerated the transition timetable.

The RCSB's PDB gives researchers access to more information about biological structures from a single source than ever before. Via the WWW, database users in academia, government and industry access archival services and formulate complex queries that will provide reliable answers to further their research efforts.

The three-dimensional structures of proteins and other biological macromolecules contained in the PDB hold significant promise for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries in the search for new drugs with few or no side effects and the effort to understand the mystery of human disease.

The PDB is supported by funds from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Biology and Environmental Research at the Department of Energy, and two units of the National Institutes of Health the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Library of Medicine.

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