[wwPDB] The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced that they will award David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 for computational protein design and protein structure prediction.

More than 60,000 PDB depositors have submitted experimental data that are carefully reviewed, validated, and biocurated by the wwPDB team. wwPDB partners adhere to the FAIR principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability, and ensure that all archival data can be accessed at no charge and with no limitations on usage under the most permissive Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal License.

These PDB data provided training sets for developing protein design and prediction methods recognized by this award. The models generated by AlphaFold and RoseTTAfold produce remarkably accurate 3D structures based on a given sequence. In turn, these models are driving new PDB depositions, as they can be used for molecular replacement in MX or combined with 3DEM density maps to reveal atomic details at a level and quality often unattainable by prediction or experimentation alone.

Also notable is the impact of PDBx/mmCIF, which has become the data standard for structural biology. PDBx/mmCIF provides an extensible data representation that is used for deposition and archiving of experimentally determined 3D structures of biological macromolecules by the wwPDB. Extensions of PDBx/mmCIF (ModelCIF) are similarly used for computed structure models by ModelArchive, for models computed with the AlphaFold 2.0 deep learning software suite, and the AlphaFold Database.

The wwPDB congratulates these researchers and their teams for their revolutionary achievements that have changed the field.

Illustration: A protein can consist of everything from tens of amino acids to several thousand (PDF).

[ wwPDB News ]