South Middlesex Times

Federal science agencies have renewed and increased funding for the digital archive of protein structures at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. This open-access resource has supported research across various fields, including agriculture and zoology, and contributed to Nobel Prize-winning discoveries.

The Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) Protein Data Bank will receive $49.4 million in federal funds through 2028. The funding comes from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health.

The RCSB Protein Data Bank is a collaboration between Rutgers, the University of California San Diego, and the University of California San Francisco. Between 2019-2023, it received $34.3 million in federal funding.

"We are honored that so many scientific and medical achievements stemming from access to the data bank have been recognized for their profound impact on science and society," said Stephen K. Burley, Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank. "We are excited at the prospect of enabling many more insights and innovations coming from global biological and biomedical research communities."

The Protein Data Bank serves as a U.S. data center within a worldwide partnership established in 2003 to manage this global public resource jointly.

Understanding protein structures is essential in molecular biology because it helps predict interactions with other molecules, aids drug design targeting specific proteins, and provides insights into biological processes and diseases.

Helen M. Berman co-founded the Protein Data Bank in 1971 with colleagues when she was a protein crystallographer at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. She brought it to Rutgers in 1998.

"When we first began to think about having a Protein Data Bank in the 1960s, there were only a handful of proteins whose structures had been determined," Berman said. "My hope for the future is that having seen the enormous benefits of curating and archiving data, more scientific communities will follow."

The database has grown significantly over five decades with contributions from over 60,000 scientists worldwide.

In recent years, it played a crucial role during COVID-19 by providing researchers with access to thousands of SARS-CoV-2 protein structures which aided vaccine development efforts such as mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

Roland Dunbrack at Fox Chase Cancer Center emphasized its importance: "We have used PDB to establish criteria for active forms among human kinase genes," he said while discussing his research on anticancer drugs targeting these enzymes involved in cell growth control mechanisms affected by cancer-causing mutations.