RCSB PDB Data Validation and Deposition Services

As of July 19, 2015: ADIT closed for all X-ray depositions.

Please use the wwPDB Deposition Tool to submit new crystal structure data.

Depositing large structures?

If your structure exceeds the size of the traditional PDB file format limits (>62 chains or >99,999 atoms), please prepare your deposition as a single PDBx/mmCIF file using recent versions of CCP4 (REFMAC > 5.8) or Phenix (> 1.8.2) before submitting your structure with the wwPDB Deposition System.

The following data deposition tools and instructions can make your structure deposition easy, complete and accurate:

Review wwPDB Policies and Procedures to be familiar with the latest format and deposition policy.
Gather information about the proteins/nucleic acids in your structure from sequence databases (e.g. using UniProtKB 1 or BLAST 2 ) or about your ligand (using Ligand Expo 3 ). Instructions will be provided during deposition to deposit new ligands. Collect log files from data processing, scaling, MR, refinement, etc. (pdb_extract can parse these files for you and gather sequence information for what was in the sample.)
Convert and Check crystallographic structure factors with SF-Tool. The deposited structure factor file should be the one that was used for the final refinement. It can either be in mmCIF, ASCII, or mtz formats and should at least include h, k, l, F, SigmaF (and/or I and SigmaI) and test flags. Definitions and format are available in DOC (48 KB) and PDF (24 KB) format.
Prepare your structural data for deposition using pdb_extract 4, which can extract information from log files and/or the desktop version of ADIT.

THEN

Validate your structure using the new X-ray Validation Server or the older Validation Server for NMR/3DEM..
Deposit your structure using the new wwPDB Deposition system (X-ray only), ADIT-NMR, or EMDB.

The Validation Server can also be used to monitor improvements made to your structural model before you begin the deposition process.

Tutorials: pdb_extract Ligand Expo Validation Structure Factor File Conversions Chemical Component Dictionary Content Description
Policies and Procedures wwPDB Policies wwPDB Procedures RCSB PDB Data Processing and Annotation Procedures Manual (updated December 2012): PDF

Questions, comments and suggestions should be sent to deposit@deposit.rcsb.org

1 The UniProt Consortium. (2008) "The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt)." Nucleic Acids Res. 36:D190-D195.
2 Altschul, S.F., Gish, W., Miller, W., Myers, E.W. & Lipman, D.J. (1990) "Basic local alignment search tool." J. Mol. Biol. 215:403-410.
3 Feng, Z., Chen, L., Maddula, H., Akcan, O., Oughtred, R., Berman, H.M., & Westbrook, J. (2004) " Ligand Depot: a data warehouse for ligands bound to macromolecules " Bioinformatics 20:2153-2155.
4 Yang, H., Guranovic, V., Dutta, S., Feng, Z., Berman, H.M., & Westbrook, J.D. (2004) " Automated and accurate deposition of structures solved by X-ray diffraction to the Protein Data Bank. " Acta Cryst. D60, 1833-1839.