The people at brookhaven have gone to quite a bit of work to make
it usable. If you ftp with anonymous to pdb.pdb.bnl.gov there is a
lot of information on how to use it.
To start with get the latest newsletter from /newsletter. There are something
like 2000 entries, so DON'T mget them. These are also enough that
most unix machines won't let you search them all. (i.e.
grep -i "protein g" *.ent will return "too many files" ). However there
are a whole mess of extracted data files (*.idx) with compound and author in the
/index area, and these are well worth grabbing. These files are readily
searched.
IMO you do want to be careful with some of the older entries. crystallographic
refinement (and more importantly data collection) has really improved in the
last few years and some of the older files have less than ideal quality.
The assignments of secondary structure are also sometimes rather suspect.
hope this is useful
rob
--
robert w. harrison
harrison at asterix.jci.tju.edu
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Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.
Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.
-- Mike Adams
When in doubt, use brute force.
-- Ken Thompson
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is
not hereditary.
-- Thomas Paine
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat,
and wrong.
-- H. L. Mencken
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