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The PDBe search databaseHistoryThe Protein Data Bank in Europe Group (PDBe) is the European project for the collection, management and distribution of data about macromolecular structures. The PDBe has the aim to serve as an alternative complementary and extensible database derived in part from the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and operating under the wwPDB international collaboration.The PDBe and others have recognised long ago the limitations of the PDB flat file format and the need of an extensible framework for macromolecular structure related information. After taking into account the advances in information management and database technologies over the last decade, PDBe adopted the pragmatic approach of using relational databases in order to support its operations. The new PDBe databaseAfter major remediation efforts by the wwPDB members to clean and normalise the underlying PDB data archive it was decided that the PDBe macromolecular structure Database should reflect the organisation of the PDB data based on the mmCIF data dictonary (logical model) directly. This makes the assumption that the remediation of the archive PDB data has correctly defined relationships of the underlying structure data and that the data is itself correct. The precursor step of a depostion database is no longer required. All validation of the data is performed as part of data loading and the DB reflects the relationships of the mmCIF dictionary.Current release cycleThe new PDbe database released to support the PDBe services mid January 2009 was designed with the main goal of being easily maintained as it conforms to an existing mmCIF logical data model. The new database also has the advantage of rapid loading and performs well as a search database directly. The PDBe group will make available full documentation. It is intended that the DB will be downloaded by users to install as local instance; additionally, loaders and other tools that are useful to the scientific community will be released in the future.
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