ABSTRACT
The European Bioinformatics Institute (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/) was established in 1995
as a home for a large set of biological databases covering a broad range of topics, from nucleotide sequence to protein function. From its inception the EBI hosted the EMBL nucleotide sequence database (1) and TREMBL-SWISSPROT (2). The E-MSD (EBIMacromolecular Structure Database, https://msd.ebi.ac.uk/) was set up in 1996 to give Europe an autonomous facility to collect, organize, and make available data about macromolecular structures and to integrate better biological macromolecular coordinate data with the other databases already at the EBI. Since then, the E-MSD group has been working in three main areas:
Accepting and processing depositions to the Protein Data Bank (PDB) Transforming the PDB flat file archive to a relational database system Developing services to search the PDB
1 ACCEPTING AND PROCESSING DEPOSITIONS TO THE PROTEIN DATA BANK (PDB)
In 1996 the PDB franchise was held by Brookhaven National Laboratories (BNL). One of the first projects at the E-MSD was to set up a local copy of AutoDep, the PDB Web deposition interface developed at BNL, in order to improve the ease of deposition to the PDB for European groups. From early 1998 the E-MSD essentially provided a mirror that, at the end of the deposition process, forwarded the raw data files to BNL, where they were compiled into a PDB entry. During 1998 there were 2201 depositions to the PDB, 534 (24%) of which were routed through EBI in this fashion.
