Introduction

The Protein Data Bank (PDB) is an archive of experimentally determined three-dimensional structures of biological macromolecules that serves a global community of researchers, educators, and students. The data contained in the archive include atomic coordinates, bibliographic citations, primary and secondary structure, information, and crystallographic structure factors and NMR experimental data.

This guide describes the "PDB format" used by the members of the worldwide Protein Data Bank (Berman, H.M., Henrick, K. and Nakamura, H. (2003) Announcing the worldwide Protein Data Bank. Nat Struct Biol, 10, 980). Questions should be sent to info@wwpdb.org

This version of the PDB file format has been used in the wwPDB to integrate uniformity and remediation data into a single set of archival data files. This document describes the small number of differences between version 3.0 and the preceding version 2.3 formats. The complete details of the PDB format version 2.3 can be found at http://www.wwpdb.org/docs.html.