MESSAGE FROM THE RCSB PDB

New Beta Site Will Replace the Current RCSB PDB Portal on January 1, 2006

To provide a powerful portal for studying the structures of biological macromolecules and their relationships to sequence, function, and disease, the RCSB has enhanced and revised the RCSB web and FTP sites.

We encourage you to test and review http://www.rcsb.org and ftp://ftpbeta.rcsb.org before these resources replace the versions currently in production at www.pdb.org and ftp.rcsb.org on January 1, 2006.

The enhanced web design offers improved navigation for easily locating the resources and tools offered by the RCSB PDB. An always-present left hand menu makes features and resources related to structural genomics, education, and software easily attainable.

The search tab offers different ways of accessing the RCSB PDB database, including a new method for "browsing" through structures grouped in categories related to disease, molecular function, biochemical process, or cellular location.

The reengineered database is based upon the PDB data that has been remediated and standardized. Tools to examine these data include: improved ligand searching; a clear distinction between the reported primary and derived data; and the integration of external data resources currently not available on the production site.

A searchable help system with a glossary and user guide provides detailed information for accessing the website, database, and for understanding PDB data. A narrated presentation in Flash is linked from the beta site homepage to guide users through searching, navigating, generating reports, visualizing structures, and browsing PDB data.

The structural genomics portal offers target summary reports for each center, databases that track the progress of protein studies (TargetDB and PepcDB), and a tool to explore the distributions of functions found among structural genomics structures, PDB structures, genomes, and homology models.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the development of this resource through their feedback. Additional comments should be sent to betafeedback@rcsb.org.

RCSB PDB Beta Site: http://www.rcsb.org/
RCSB PDB Beta FTP Site: ftp://ftpbeta.rcsb.org
Tutorial for using the new site: http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/tutorials/tutorial.html