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Announcement: Meeting on Hybrid Methods

The 6th International Conference on Structural Analysis of Supramolecular Assemblies by Hybrid Methods will be held March 14-18, 2012 in Lake Tahoe, CA.

EM Data Bank to join the PDB archive

The EM Data Bank (EMDB), the primary archive for experimentally-determined maps obtained using three-dimensional electron microscopy methods, will join the PDB archive on 7 March 2012.

Improved 3D Viewing for EM Maps and Models

We are pleased to announce improved 3D web-based viewing of maps and associated coordinate models from EMDataBank atlas pages. The molecular visualization program OpenAstexViewer has been adapted by the EMDataBank team to display EM maps and their associated coordinate models.

PDB40 Symposium

In October 2011, the Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB) will host a scientific symposium celebrating the 40th anniversary of the inception of the PDB, and the many scientific contributions it archives. The program will showcase the scientific impact made by structural biology during the past 40 years with a distinguished panel of scientists who have been instrumental in the development of the PDB and structural biology.

Cryo-EM Modeling Challenge Update: Biopolymers Special Issue Call For Papers

A special issue of Biopolymers will cover the results of the first Cryo-EM Modeling Challenge held in 2010 with accompanying workshop at PSB 2011. The challenge was very successful with 136 models submitted by 10 different research groups using 13 different software packages.

EMDB reaches 1000 entries!

February 2011: Congratulations are in order to the cryoEM community for reaching a significant milestone: more than 1000 maps representing a wide variety of biological assemblies are now archived in the EM DataBank.

Announcement - Change in EMDB Hold Policy for Maps

Effective January 2011, the option to hold EM map volumes for two years before release to the public will no longer be available.

EMDataBank.org: New Publications

Up-to-date information about EMDataBank.org including history, current status, and future plans can be found in two publications now available online and in press.

Improved Uniformity of the EMDB Map Archive

September 2010: We are pleased to announce that a more uniform set of maps is now available through EMDataBank.org search services and ftp mirror sites.

EM Project Leader Position at PDBe

July 2010: The Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe; pdbe.org) has a vacancy for the Project Leader Electron Microscopy position.

Announcement: 2010 Cryo-EM Modeling Challenge and PSB 2011 Workshop

2010 Cryo-EM Modeling Challenge and PSB 2011 workshop organized by Steven Ludtke, Wah Chiu, Helen Berman and Gerard Kleywegt.

Remediated Maps Available in Beta

June 2010: The EmDataBank.org team is nearing completion of a major project to improve uniformity, viewability and useability of the 730+ map volumes in the EMDB that are currently available for download. Please read on to learn more about this project, and how to access the remediated maps.

EMDB Weekly Release Cycle

You may have noticed that the emdatabank.org site is updated on a weekly basis. EMDB's weekly release cycle is also now synchronized with wwPDB's release cycle.

Modelling of CryoEM Maps Workshop

You have a brand new cryoEM density map of a biological assembly and want to generate a realistic coordinate model that fits the density. How should you proceed? This was the primary topic of discussion at the Modelling of CryoEM maps workshop held at the University of Houston on January 14-18, 2010.

Advanced Topics EM Structure Determination Workshop

The Workshop on Advanced Topics in EM Structure Determination: Challenging Molecules held Nov 8-13, 2009 at the National Resource for Automated Molecular Microscopy (NRAMM) at the Scripps Research Institute, was an intellectually stimulating meeting with over 100 attendees and an outstanding set of instructors. The meeting featured extensive discussion of challenges faced using cryoEM to solve macromolecules that are either small or conformationally variable in structure...

Ribosomes in the EMDB

7 October 2009: This morning, the recipients of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry were announced. V. Ramakrishnan, T. A. Steitz, and A. E. Yonath will share the award for their studies on the structure and function of the ribosome.

September 2009 EM Meetings

Christoph Best (PDBe) gave a presentation on how to deposit and retrieve data sets in the EMDB at the 10-day EMBO Course in Cryo-Electron Microscopy at Birkbeck College, London organized by Elena Orlova and Helen Saibil.

2009 3DEM GRC

The 2009 3DEM Gordon Research Conference in New London, NH was an exciting meeting with a full roster of excellent presentations and ample time for informal discussions. EMDataBank.org team members Christoph Best (PDBe) and Cathy Lawson (RCSB-PDB) presented a poster describing recent progress towards creating a unified data resource for cryoEM

New EMDB Services

March 2009: We are pleased to announce improvements to EM Databank deposition and retrieval services hosted by PDBe (Europe) and RCSB PDB (USA).

Symmetry Representation in the PDB

An open access article published in the August 2008 issue of Acta Crystallographica Section D describes the new scheme used by the PDB to archive regular non-crystallographic symmetry information for large biological assemblies.

Deposit Maps at EBI or RCSB

Feb 2008: Electron microscopy map data can now be deposited to the EMDB using the improved web-based tool EmDep2.

2D Crystal Workshop

Jan 2008: An informal one day workshop organized by Wah Chiu and Cathy Lawson was held on Jan 15, 2008 at the UCSF Mission Bay Campus.

Unified Data Resource for CryoEM

Aug 2007: An NIH/NIGMS-funded collaboration to create a unified data resource for large complexes determined by cryo-electron microscopy has been established between the Macromolecular Structure Database Group at the European Bioinformatics Institute, the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics at Rutgers, and the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging at Baylor College of Medicine.

EM Community Outreach History

In order to develop a community data resource, it is necessary to solicit input from representative members of the scientific community. Below is a summary of past workshops devoted to exchange of cryoEM data that have been organized by members of our project group and other leaders in cryoEM.

Nov 2002, IIMS Workshop, organized by Kim Henrick, Jose-Maria Carazo (Madrid), and Stephen Fuller (Oxford), held at Hinxton, Cambridge, UK, workshop report