The Worldwide Protein Data Bank, wwPDB, is an organization that maintains the archive of macromolecular structure. Its mission is to maintain a single Protein Data Bank Archive of macromolecular structural data that is freely and publicly available to the global community.
The organization has four members:
The wwPDB was founded in 2003 by RCSB PDB (USA), PDBe (Europe) and PDBj (Japan). In 2006 BMRB (USA) joined the wwPDB.
Each member's site can accept structural data and process the data. The processed data is sent to the "archive keeper". The RCSB PDB presently acts as the "archive keeper". This ensures that there is only one version of the data which is identical for all users. The modified database is then made available to the other wwPDB members, each of whom makes the resulting structure files available through their websites to the public. (Data is accessed from the wwPDB website itself only through links to the member websites.) The member sites are more than just mirrors of the archive keeper, because the members offer different tools on their websites for analysing the structures in the database.
Accomplishments (taken from wwPDB annual reports)