Archiving molecular structures challenges databases

Nature : Since its inception in 1971, the Protein Data Bank (PDB) has served as a freely accessible depository and archive for the three-dimensional structures of proteins and other biomolecules. Most of the structures in the PDB are for single molecules determined by x-ray crystallography. Now new techniques—and new combinations of techniques—record the structures of bulky molecular complexes, such as the ribosome. Some structures consist of movies. Earlier this month a workshop convened in Hinxton in the UK to tackle the challenge of storing those structures. Not only do they require more disk space, they also require new formats to define them. As Ewen Callaway reports for Nature, the workshop resolved to seek funding to meet those challenges and to set up a new database dedicated to the ribosome, RNA polymerase, and other molecular machines.