Protein Data Bank (wwPDB)

Single global archive of experimentally determined 3D atomic coordinates of proteins, nucleic acids, and drug–target complexes.

Specifications & Metrics

type: 3D Macromolecular Structure Archive
maintainer: Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB: RCSB PDB, PDBe, PDBj, BMRB, and EMDB)
identifier format: 4-character alphanumeric PDB ID (e.g., 4HHB) and extended PDBx/mmCIF identifiers
license: CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
introduced: 1971

Announced in October 1971 in Nature New Biology by Walter Hamilton at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Olga Kennard at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, the PDB grew from 7 initial structures to pass 200,000 structures in January 2023.
Since 2003 the archive has been jointly managed by the Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB) consortium — RCSB PDB (US), PDBe (Europe), and PDBj (Japan), joined by BMRB (2006) and EMDB (2021) — under a CC0 public-domain dedication.
Deposited structures determined by X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, and cryo-electron microscopy are validated and distributed in the macromolecular Crystallographic Information File (mmCIF) standard for structure-based drug design.