2020 July is the 20th anniversary of PDBj.

Protein Data Bank Japan (PDBj) is celebrating the 20th anniversary in July, 2020. It was July 6th, 2000 when PDBj locally processed the 1st deposition to Osaka University, as a part of the JST-BIRD project. While in 2000, only 157 entries were processed locally by PDBj, we grew very rapidly and were able to process 376 entries in 2001 due to the kind technical and scientific help from RCSB PDB, and processed 602 entries in 2002. With the formation of the wwPDB in 2003, Asia and Oceania were assigned to PDBj, but due to a dramatic increase of depositions from Asia, especially main land China, PDBj’s regional area was reassigned to be Asia and the Middle-East in 2016. Since PDBj was established, we have also been building secondary databases such as eF-Site and ProMode, introducing new formats such as PDBMLplus and PDB/RDF, and developed original tools such as Molmil or MagRO. We would like to express our gratitude for the continuous contribution and help from depositors, users and the seamless financial support by JST and from 2017 partly by AMED. PDBj will remain as the central data-hub of Structural Biology in Asia and the Middle-East. We would highly appreciate it, if our community would continue to support and encourage us with our endeavors.