These structural data are obtained and deposited by biologists and biochemists worldwide through the use of experimental methodologies such as X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, and, increasingly, cryo-electron microscopy.

[2] Global access to the data is provided by the websites of the wwPDB member organisations (PDBe,[3] PDBj,[4] RCSB PDB,[5] and BMRB[6]).

For example, SCOP and CATH classify protein structures, while PDBsum provides a graphic overview of PDB entries using information from other sources, such as Gene Ontology.

In 1969, with the sponsorship of Walter Hamilton at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Edgar Meyer (Texas A&M University) began to write software to store atomic coordinate files in a common format to make them available for geometric and graphical evaluation.

By 1971, one of Meyer's programs, SEARCH, enabled researchers to remotely access information from the database to study protein structures offline.

The structure files may be viewed using one of several free and open source computer programs, including Jmol, Pymol, VMD, Molstar and Rasmol.

Other non-free, shareware programs include ICM-Browser,[23] MDL Chime, UCSF Chimera, Swiss-PDB Viewer,[24] StarBiochem[25] (a Java-based interactive molecular viewer with integrated search of protein databank), Sirius, and VisProt3DS[26] (a tool for Protein Visualization in 3D stereoscopic view in anaglyph and other modes), and Discovery Studio.

The RCSB PDB website contains an extensive list of both free and commercial molecule visualization programs and web browser plugins.