MESSAGE FROM THE RCSB PDB

In September, the RCSB PDB hosted a series of important meetings at the Chauncey Conference Center in Princeton, NJ. These meetings, held back-to-back, provided an unprecedented opportunity for discussion and planning.

The RCSB PDB Advisory Committee, an organization of international experts in X-ray crystallography, NMR, 3-D EM, bioinformatics, and education, listened to presentations and discussed future plans and goals. This review was followed by the Worldwide Protein Data Bank's Advisory Committee (wwPDB AC) Meeting. This panel of expert structural biologists includes representatives from the International Union of Crystallography and the International Conferences on Magnetic Resonance in Biological Systems. After the advisory committee considered reports from the wwPDB, a "Funding Forum" took place where the wwPDB AC sought advice on funding options for the continued operation of the wwPDB organization from the representatives present from the agencies that fund the individual groups. Representatives from the academic and industrial research communities that rely on the PDB for their research efforts spoke of the PDB value.

Taking advantage of having everyone in the same place, a retreat was held for members from all of the wwPDB sites. While the wwPDB sites interact regularly, September's retreat was the first meeting on such a large scale, with almost 50 people from all four sites participating. Many colleagues met in person for the first time. The retreat also provided an opportunity to celebrate the August release of the remediated PDB archive (ftp://ftp.wwpdb.org) - a major milestone for the group that represents years of work and an unprecedented international collaboration.

At the start of the meeting, the wwPDB was treated to presentations from PDB users and advisors - Edward N. Baker (Professor of Structural Biology, University of Auckland), Angela Gronenborn (UPMC Rosalind Franklin Professor and Chair, Department of Structural Biology, University of Pittsburgh), Gerard Kleywegt (Research Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Research Scientist, Uppsala University), Marin Van Heel (Professor of Structural Biology, Imperial College London), and Soichi Wakatsuki (Professor, Structural Biology Research Center, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, Japan). The retreat then focused on discussing how the wwPDB could evolve with and anticipate the needs of the scientific community.

Special thanks to all of the advisors, funding agency representatives, and wwPDB collaborators who traveled to New Jersey for these important meetings.

Members from the RCSB PDB, MSD-EBI, PDBj, and BMRB at the wwPDB Retreat