Right from the start X-ray crystallographers saw the importance of making the wealth of structural information as widely available as possible. Therefore, in 1971 the PDB (Protein Data Bank) was established at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Currently, the archiving is in the hands of a consortium with headquarters at Rutgers University.
Whereas, it took the pioneer Max Perutz nearly 30 years to elucidate the atomic structural details of hemoglobin, under favorable conditions new structures can be cracked in a matter of weeks to months at present. This has led to an explosive growth in the number of known 3D protein structures, as illustrated in a graph:
At present, 28 May 2002, the PDB (http://www.rcsb.org/) contains 17,765 experimental structures, 84% from crystallography and 16% from NMR methods.
