PDBe: Protein Data Bank in Europe

The Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe; pdbe.org) is actively involved in managing the international archive of biomacromolecular structure data as one of the partners in the Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB; wwpdb.org). PDBe also develops new tools to make structural data more widely and more easily available to the biomedical community. PDBe has developed a browser to access and analyze the structural archive using classification systems that are familiar to chemists and biologists. The PDBe web pages that describe individual PDB entries have been enhanced through the introduction of plain-English summary pages and iconic representations of the contents of an entry (PDBprints). In addition, the information available for structures determined by means of NMR spectroscopy has been expanded. Finally, the entire web site has been redesigned to make it substantially easier to use for expert and novice users alike. PDBe works closely with other teams at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and in the international scientific community to develop new resources with value-added information. The SIFTS initiative is an example of such a collaboration--it provides extensive mapping data between proteins whose structures are available from the PDB and a host of other biomedical databases. SIFTS is widely used by major bioinformatics resources.