Data Deposition/Biocuration Services and
Archive Management

In the first quarter of 2026, 5306 experimentally-determined structures were deposited to the PDB archive. Data are processed by wwPDB partners RCSB PDB, PDBe, PDBj and PDBc.

Of the structures deposited in 2026 so far, 84.6% were deposited with a release status of hold until publication 4.7% were released as soon as annotation of the entry was complete and 10.8% were held until a particular date. 54.5% of these entries were determined by 3DEM, 44.5% by X-ray crystallographic methods, and 1.0% by NMR methods. 11 entries were from integrative methods.

During the same period, 4286 structures were released in the PDB and 2801 maps were released in the EMDB.

By 2028 4-character PDB IDs (e.g. 1abc) will be fully allocated. After that, all new entries will be assigned only extended PDB IDs.

The new extended PDB ID format has 12 characters, which includes a prefix pdb_ followed by 8 alphanumeric characters, e.g. pdb_1000axyz. This new ID format will enable text mining detection of PDB entries in the published literature and allow for more informative and transparent delivery of revised data files.

A PDB Beta Archive is now available to help the PDB community adopt extended PDB IDs and the PDBx/mmCIF format during the transition phase. All files at this archive are re-organized with extended PDB ID (including file naming and directories) at entry level, mirroring the same data organization of the PDB Versioned Archive.

When four character PDB IDs are about to be consumed, this PDB Beta Archive will replace the current PDB Archive (July 21, 2027). Entries with extended PDB IDs issued at this point will not be compatible with the legacy PDB format.

wwPDB encourages scientific journals, PDB community and users to transition to PDBx/mmCIF format and extended IDs as early as possible.

For more, watch the webinar How to Use the Beta PDB Archive and Extended PDB IDs Today. 

The Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) experiments, held biennially, have recently witnessed a revolution in modeling accuracy driven by deep learning.

CASP is only possible through the generous participation of the experimental community. A total of 1,300 targets have been obtained over the previous sixteen CASP rounds. CASP is now more tightly focused on areas where deep learning methods are not yet adequate and where there is major applied significance to success. This tighter focus makes obtaining good target sets more challenging than in the past.

Learn more on how you can help advance the frontiers of structural biology at wwPDB.

At the end of February 2026, the PDB archive contained more than 250,000 entries.

Established in 1971, this central, public archive has reached this critical milestone thanks to the efforts of structural biologists throughout the world who contribute their experimentally-determined protein and nucleic acid structure data.

wwPDB data centers support online access to three-dimensional structures of biological macromolecules that help researchers understand many facets of biomedicine, agriculture, and ecology, from protein synthesis to health and disease to biological energy.

The wwPDB passed the 200,000 milestone in 2023. More than 20,000 new structure depositions were submitted to the archive in 2025; PDB data were accessed more than 4.7 billion times in the same year.

wwPDB eagerly awaits the next 50,000 structures and the invaluable knowledge these new data will bring.