Annual Report 2011 - Center for Advanced Biotechnology and ...

Dr. Helen M. Berman
Board of Governors Professor
Department of Chemistry and
Chemical Biology
Interim Director
Biological, Mathematical, and
Physical Sciences Interfaces
(BioMaPS),
Director
RCSB Protein Data Bank
Director
PSI Structural Biology
Knowledgebase
Rutgers University
Dr. Martha Quesada
Research Professor
Dr. John Westbrook
Research Professor
Dr. Feng Zukang
Research Professor
Dr. Catherine Lawson
Associate Research Professor
Dr. Shuchismita Dutta
Assistant Research Professor
Dr. Monica Sekharan
Assistant Research Professor
Dr. Jasmine Young
Assistant Research Professor
Structural Biology and Bioinformatics
Dr. Berman's research area is structural biology and bioinformatics, with a
special focus on protein-nucleic acid interactions. She is the founder of the
Nucleic Acid Database, a repository of information about the structures of
nucleic acid-containing molecules; and is the co-founder and Director of the
Protein Data Bank, the international repository of the structures of biological
macromolecules. Professor Berman also leads the Protein Structure Initiative
Structural Biology Knowledgebase. She is a Fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Biophysical Society,
from which she received the Distinguished Service Award in 2000. A past
president of the American Crystallographic Association, she is a recipient of
the Buerger Award (2006) and a member of the inaugural class of ACA
Fellows (2011). Dr. Berman received her A.B. in 1964 from Barnard College
and a Ph.D. in 1967 from the University of Pittsburgh. She received the
Department of Chemistry Alumni Award from the University of Pittsburgh in
2010.
The Protein Data Bank
The Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) Protein Data Bank
(PDB) supports scientific research and education worldwide by providing an essential
resource of information about biomolecular structures.
The PDB archive is the single repository of information about the 3D structures of
large biological molecules, primarily proteins and nucleic acids. Scientists from
around the world submit their data about their experiments to the PDB, which is then
processed and made freely available in the PDB archive. The RCSB PDB, which is
based at Rutgers and the University of California, San Diego, manages the PDB
archive as a member of the Worldwide PDB (wwPDB).
The wwPDB organization (www.wwpdb.org) was formed to ensure that the PDB
archive is and will be freely and publicly available to the global community. The
wwPDB members (RCSB PDB, Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe), Protein Data
Bank Japan (PDBj), and the BioMagResBank (BMRB)) host deposition, processing,
and distribution centers for PDB data and collaborate on a variety of projects and
outreach efforts. As 'archive keeper' for the wwPDB, the RCSB PDB maintains the
central repository of the PDB archive.
The central activity of the wwPDB is the collection, validation, archiving and
distribution of high quality structural data to the scientific community on a timely
basis. The systems developed by the RCSB PDB are reliable and stable to meet the
challenges of high data rates and complex structures. As of November 8, 2011, the
PDB archive contains more than 77,000 entries.
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