Section 24.4.2. History of the BMCD

The BMCD has its roots in work that was initiated in Dr David Davies' laboratory at NIH in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Gilliland & Davies, 1984). Working on a variety of frustrating protein-crystallization problems, a large body of crystallization information was extracted from the literature. This eventually led to a systematic search of the literature and a compilation of data that included almost all of the crystallization reports of biological macromolecules available at the time. In 1983 the data, as an ASCII file, were submitted to the Protein Data Bank (Chapter 24.5 ) for public distribution. The data included the crystallization conditions for 1025 crystal forms of more than 616 biological macromolecules.

In 1987, with assistance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Standard Reference Data Program, the data were incorporated into a true database and distributed with software that made it accessible using a personal computer. The database was released to the public in 1989 as the NIST/CARB (Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology) Biological Macromolecule Crystallization Database, version 1.0 (Gilliland, 1988). In 1990, a second version of the software and data for the PC database was released (Gilliland & Bickham, 1990), and in 1994 the BMCD began including data from crystal-growth studies carried out in microgravity (Gilliland et al., 1994). Recently, the BMCD has been ported to a UNIX platform to take advantage of the development of network capabilities that give the user community access to the most recent updates and allow rapid implementation of new features and capabilities of the software (Gilliland et al., 1996).