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 Data Bank. This achievement comes just nine years since EMDB began in 2002 and reflects the rapid growth of cryoEM reconstruction methods and their increasingly wide application in structural biology research. A record 267 maps were deposited in 2010^*, including ten with reported resolution between 5 and 3.3 Å. In comparison, it took twenty years for the Protein Data Bank, founded in 1971, to reach 1000 entries. The increased interest of the community in archiving map volumes resulting from EM reconstruction experiments signals the potential for EMDB to develop into a major structural biology resource over the next decade.

We are also pleased to report that EM structures from EMDB and PDB were featured on the cover of the January 2011 Nucleic Acids Research database issue, in conjunction with our article EMDataBank.org: Unified Data Resource for CryoEM. The article provides an overview of the EM structural data archives and the Unified Data Resource, including historical context, current content and use, and future prospects. deposition services are hosted at at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) and enable joint deposition of maps to EMDB and associated fitted models to the PDB. We are currently working in conjunction with world wide PDB partners to develop a more robust and automated system to handle deposition and annotation of structures derived from all types of experiments, including EM--stay tuned for more details.

^*The original version of this news item stated 228 maps deposited in 2010, but this was an undercount.