Three-year Grant to Increase Researcher Access to Archived Molecule Structures.

A bioinformatics researcher at SDSC was awarded a three-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant worth almost $1.4 million to make biological structures more widely available to scientists, educators, and students. The NIH award, as part of the agency’s Targeted Software Development Awards and its Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative launched in 2012, was granted to Peter Rose, Site Head of the RCSB Protein Data Bank (PDB) West at SDSC and Project Scientist of the Center’s Structural Bioinformatics Laboratory, and Andreas Prlić, Technical and Scientific Team lead at the RCSB PDB. The RCSB Protein Data Bank is the single worldwide repository for the three-dimensional structures of large molecules and nucleic acids that are vital to pharmacology and bioinformatics research. In May 2014, the PDB archived its 100,000^th molecule structure, doubling its size in just six years.  The 3-D structures, shapes of proteins and nucleic acids, now number about 111,000 and as the building blocks of life are fundamental to the understanding of disease processes, the mechanism of drug actions, and the development of new medicines.