Structural genomics: winning the second half of the game.

The Protein Data Bank (PDB) has close to 50,000 entries at present, seven times its size in 1997, and SwissProt has close to 300,000, five times the number ten years ago (http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/static.do?p=general_information/pdb_statistics/; http://www.expasy.org/sprot/relnotes/relstat.html). The gap between sequences and structures is still huge, a factor of ten to twenty depending on how redundancy is evaluated, but it has stopped increasing. The fast growth of the PDB in recent years is a remarkable achievement, and the community of structural biologists is rightly proud of it.