Data included in protein structure databases often includes three-dimensional coordinates as well as experimental information, such as unit cell dimensions and angles for x-ray crystallography determined structures.
Protein structure databases are critical for many efforts in computational biology such as structure based drug design, both in developing the computational methods used and in providing a large experimental dataset used by some methods to provide insights about the function of a protein.
Today the PDB is maintained by an international consortia collectively known as the Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB).
The mission of the wwPDB is to maintain a single archive of macromolecular structural data that is freely and publicly available to the global community.
Examples of protein structure databases include (in alphabetical order);