Outreach and Education

Download the challenge flyer
to post in your school.

In 2014, students created impressive videos illustrating the structural biology of HIV. This year, RCSB PDB is challenging students to tell a story of defeating, combating, and controlling the HIV pandemic at the molecular level using structures from the PDB.

An esteemed panel of judges will review the videos and make three awards: Judge's Choice, Viewer's Choice, and Service to the Community. The deadline for submission is May 31, 2015.

Many resources are offered to help students get started, including the new video Learn about HIV from the RCSB PDB.

Visit PDB-101 for an overview, rules, HIV-related education materials, tutorials on making videos, and more.

At the NY Structural Biology Discussion Group

Introducing the PDB to "Young Women" in Princeton. More photos on Facebook.

Making marshmallow models at the Science Expo in San Diego.

At the NY Structural Biology Discussion Group (January 21, New York Academy of Sciences), RCSB PDB annotators presented two posters. Sutapa Ghosh and Ezra Peisach led a discussion of Protein Data Bank: A Resource for Drug Discovery that highlighted search and reporting capabilities at rcsb.org, including searching by drug name and access to data from BindingDB. Luigi Di Costanzo and Monica Sekharan described Recent wwPDB Developments: Producing More Uniform and Higher Quality Archive Entries that included the new Deposition and Annotation System and the incorporation of large structures as single PDBx/mmCIF files in the main PDB archive.

RCSB PDB members met future scientists at the Young Women's Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics hosted by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (Princeton University, March 19). Hundreds of New Jersey-area students in grades 7-10 made models of DNA and proteins as part of this event, which was aimed at increasing young women's interest in science, technology, mathematics and engineering.

In March, visitors to the RCSB PDB booth at the San Diego Festival of Science and Engineering's EXPO DAY learned about the basic building blocks of life by building 3D models of DNA and small proteins. They also watched animations of 3D proteins and nucleic acids, and took home posters and other materials about these fascinating structures.

Other events included participation in Research Data Alliance (RDA) Metadata Semantics Workshops in Indiana and California.

Students use Jmol to build a model at the NJ State Finals.

Each year, middle and high school students take part in Science Olympiad competitions across the country. Teams compete in a variety of events based around a scientific topic, with awards made for individual events and for the competition overall.

For the 2015 Science Olympiad, a protein modeling event designed by the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) and RCSB PDB challenged high school teams to build models of proteins involved in genome editing.

RCSB PDB members also supported local events, judging hundreds of models in the process. In NJ, team members judged 3 regional events and the state final. In California, RCSB PDB hosted a protein modeling workshop at UCSD, and oversaw the event at the San Diego County Regional competition.

Related materials for protein modeling preparation are hosted by MSOE and RCSB PDB to support teams as the competitions take place, leading up to the national competition in May.