Trends in scientific research. A statistical analysis on the Protein Data Bank.

Modern scientific research increasingly depends on large, openly available databases that bring together experimental results collected for many years and across multiple disciplines. As somebody working in a big national laboratory, I had the advantage of observing how these repositories not only accelerate discovery by making data more accessible but also enable new forms of quantitative and interdisciplinary analysis. One such resources, the Protein Data Bank (PDB), stands out as an extremely useful and popular archive. It combines detailed molecular information with an extensive record of experimental conditions, publication metadata, and validation metrics. Because of its scale, structure, and long history, the PDB can be studied from perspectives that extend well beyond molecular biology. This chapter introduces the PDB and discusses its significance both as a biological database and as a statistical data source.