The backbone structure of the infectious epsilon15 virus (PDB ID 3c5b, in photo) is the most recent addition to the Protein Data Bank (PDB) based at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, making it the 50,000th molecule structure released into the only worldwide repository for the three-dimensional structures of large molecules and nucleic acids.

Officially founded in 1971 with seven structures at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the archive is managed by a consortium called the worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB).

Today, the PDB archive receives approximately 25 new experimentally determined structures from scientists each day - and more than 5 million files are downloaded from the PDB archive every month. Users include structural biologists, computational biologists, biochemists, and molecular biologists in academia, government and industry as well as educators and students.

Officials estimate that the number of structures archived will triple to 150,000 molecules by 2014.

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