Abstract
This chapter describes the structure-validation procedures that are used by the Protein Data Bank (PDB) to maintain data quality. It also presents an analysis of the way these procedures are used to process new entries and postprocess or revisit the legacy data. The PDB was established in 1971 by Walter Hamilton at Brookhaven National Laboratory in response to community requirements for a central repository for information about biological macromolecular structures. The PDB collects the results of structure determination experiments, organizes the data, and makes it available to an increasingly broad community of users. As part of this process, it is the responsibility of the PDB to ensure that the data released from the PDB are represented accurately and that diagnostics are provided to assist depositors in correcting errors in the deposited structures. Combined with similar advances in the field of structural biology, there have been dramatic increases in the size of the archive and the diversity of structure data, and the community of PDB users has broadened significantly.