Notes from the 2003 ACS Conference in New Orleans

Speaker: John Tate, European Bioinformatics Institute (SDSC, 2003/02/12)

Abstract

Since 1979 the Protein Data Bank (PDB) has been the central repository of macromolecular structure data, but the present flat file archive is incapable of supporting the complex tools that are required for drug discovery, molecular medicine and bioinformatics. In order to fully exploit the volume of structural data that will soon become available, new technologies must be employed. The Macromolecular Structure Database (MSD) group has developed a relational database for storing, validating, searching and retrieving the complex structural information in the PDB. A comprehensive cleaning procedure is under way, to ensure data uniformity across the whole archive, and an extensive set of derived properties and goodness-of-fit indicators will be added. The MSD includes links to many other bioinformatics databases including InterPro, SwissProt, SCOP, CATH, PFAM and PROSITE.

BioCon2003

This are my notes from the BioCon2003 organized by O’reilly in San Diego in early 2003. This was the second (and last) of these conferences that they organized.