Protein Data Bank at Rutgers awarded $34.5 million grant

The RCSB Protein Data Bank based at Rutgers University–New Brunswick has been awarded $34.5 million in grants over five years from three U.S. government agencies.

The funding – an approximately 5 percent increase over the previous five-year period – covers ongoing operations and will expand the reach of the world’s only open-access, digital data resource for the 3-D biomolecular structures of life.

The data bank, housed at Rutgers since 1998, plans to use the increased funding to enhance services available to researchers, academic institutions, for-profit companies and the public.

The operating grants come from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and National Institute of General Medical Sciences within the National Institutes of Health.

“These grants are vital and greatly appreciated because the Protein Data Bank plays a central role in the discovery of lifesaving drugs, basic and applied biological and medical research and patent applications by universities as well as biopharmaceutical and biotechnology companies,” said principal investigator Stephen Burley, university professor and Henry Rutgers chair, who directs the data bank and the Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine. “It is a public good with far-reaching impacts, and with renewed funding we plan to help usher in a new golden age of structural biology.”

According to Rutgers, the Protein Data Bank archive houses more than 150,000 3-D structures for proteins, DNA and RNA that are freely available worldwide.

The archive is jointly managed by the Worldwide Protein Data Bank partnership, involving data centers in the United States, Europe and Asia. U.S. operations are led by the RCSB Protein Data Bank at Rutgers, the University of California, San Diego-San Diego Supercomputer Center and the University of California, San Francisco.