Processing of Backlog Structures Completed

Processing of the backlog structures inherited at the time of the PDB transition has been completed by the RCSB. These 458 structures arrived at the RCSB PDB in various stages of processing on July 1, 1999.

Several structures had been processed almost to completion by the Brookhaven National Laboratory staff, and were quickly run through final checks and modifications by the RCSB PDB staff. Other structures were fully processed by the RCSB PDB annotators and the RCSB PDB summer staff. The RCSB brought together a team to tackle the backlog structures: Nathaniel Macapagal and Michael Huang, two recent Rutgers graduates who each spent two years doing undergraduate research with the NDB, including the NDB Undergraduate Research Experience Summer Program; Andrew Napoli, a Rutgers graduate student in chemistry; and Tara Abrams, a Princeton University biochemistry undergraduate.

After a period of training directed by senior annotator Shri Jain, the RCSB PDB summer staff used ADIT, the AutoDep Input Tool, to process and annotate these structures. Every file was further reviewed by the annotator staff including Kyle Burkhardt, Victoria Petrova and Bohdan Schneider. The processed backlog structures were sent to the authors for review, and are being released according to the instructions provided by the author.

The RCSB-Rutgers team has also brought the 456 structures that were released as "Layer 1" -- meaning unannotated and unprocessed -- up to "Layer 2" status. This will ensure the uniformity of the data in the archive and marks the end of "Layer 1" files all together. Authors of these files will be contacted in the next week for final approval of the "Layer 2" release.

Michael Huang, Tara Abrams, Andy Napoli, and Nathaniel Macapagal.