As announced in the Summer 2004 newsletter, the RCSB PDB Beta Site (pdbbeta.rcsb.org) is a completely reengineered system using more consistent and comprehensive data from the data uniformity project. Data are integrated with sequence, function and disease related information and available by browsing and searching.

The RCSB is very excited about this resource, and encourages the PDB community to test the new site. We look forward to feedback sent to betafeedback@rcsb.org.

RCSB PDB PRESENTATIONS AND DEMONSTRATIONS AT 3D SIG/ISMB/ECCB AND THE PROTEIN SOCIETY MEETING

The 2004 Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference (July 31-August 4; Glasgow, Scotland) was combined this year with the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB). With over 2100 attendees, this was the largest gathering of computational biologists ever. The meeting was preceded by 3D SIG (July 29-30), the first special interest group meeting on structural bioinformatics.

The RCSB PDB gave several software demonstrations of the RCSB PDB Beta Site at 3D SIG and ISMB. Wolfgang F. Bluhm also presented a poster on this new site.

Another poster, "Protein Data Bank - Current State and Proposed Transition to a Re-engineered Query System," was presented at the 18th Symposium of the Protein Society (August 14-18, 2004, San Diego Marriot Hotel) by Nita Desphande.

WEBSITE STATISTICS

The RCSB PDB is available from several Web and FTP sites located around the world. Users are also invited to preview the newly reengineered RCSB web site at pdbbeta.rcsb.org/pdb.

The access statistics are given below for the primary RCSB PDB website at www.pdb.org.