Training, Outreach, and Education

The wwPDB Foundation made an award for an outstanding student presentation at the 2025 Biophysical Society Meeting (February 15-19, Los Angeles, CA).

Mechanisms of dysferlin-mediated membrane repair in health and disease
Hsiang-Ling Huang (1), Giovanna Grandinetti (1,2), Sarah M. Heissler (1), Krishna Chinthalapudi (1)
 (1) Department of Physiology and Cell Biology, Dorothy M. Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute, The Ohio State University College of Medicine, United States
 (2) Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis, The Ohio State University, United States

Many thanks to The Biophysical Society organizers and poster prize judges for making this award possible.

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Visit PDB-101 to future-proof your data analysis with BinaryCIF.

As macromolecular structures available through the Protein Data Bank (PDB) archive continue to grow in complexity and size, traditional text data formats like PDBx/mmCIF and the legacy PDB file format are becoming increasingly inefficient for transfer and parsing. To support scalable data analysis, binary formats and compression techniques are now essential. Learn how to future-proof your data analysis with BinaryCIF, a fully interchangeable yet drastically more efficient flavor of the PDBx/mmCIF format. BinaryCIF not only boosts storage efficiency, but also substantially improves parsing speed, making it ideal for large-scale analyses. BinaryCIF is supported by resources such as RCSB PDB, PDBe, and AlphaFold DB.

Watching this webinar will benefit bioinformaticians, data scientists, and structural biologists who want to

• Understand the basics of the PDBx/mmCIF schema
• Access BinaryCIF files and related APIs on RCSB.org
• Programmatically consume BinaryCIF data and convert between formats
• Compute archive-wide statistics across the entire PDB
• Gain hands-on experience with our Python parser

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The most popular articles read in 2024 were: Hemoglobin (top-accessed article), Mediator, Angiotensin and Blood Pressure, Insulin, Collagen, Hyaluronidases, Carbon Capture Mechanisms, Injectisome,Nanowires, and Flagellar Motor.
The article on Flagellar Motor marked a transition in the series. After a remarkable 300 columns, David Goodsell retired from the Molecule of the Month with the December 2024 edition.
Janet Iwasa is now the creator of the series, and has published articles on Assembly Line Polyketide Synthases, H5 Hemagglutinin, and Enoyl-CoA Carboxylases/Reductases.

Open access to the PDB facilitated discovery/development of 100% of the 34 new low molecular weight, protein-targeted, antineoplastic agents approved by the US FDA 2019–2023.

In addition to aggregate impact assessments, illustrative case studies are presented for six first-in-class small-molecule anti-cancer drugs.

Impact of structural biology and the Protein Data Bank on US FDA new drug approvals of low molecular weight antineoplastic agents 2019–2023
Stephen K. Burley, Amy Wu-Wu, Shuchismita Dutta, Shridar Ganesan & Steven X. F. Zheng
(2024) Oncogene 43: 2229–2243 doi:10.1038/s41388-024-03077-2

Read how freely available, atomic-level, 3D biostructure data stored in the PDB were turned into global knowledge, allowing basic and applied researchers to understand the inner workings of coronaviruses at the atomic level and discover/develop effective countermeasures.

Protein Data Bank: From two epidemics to the global pandemic to mRNA vaccines and Paxlovid
Stephen K. Burley (2025) Current Opinion in Structural Biology 90: 102954 doi:10.1016/j.sbi.2024.102954