I woke up this morning to a series of fun tweets from Protein Data Bank (PDB) (@PDBeurope), RCSB PDB (@buildmodels ), and Protein Data Bank Japan (@PDBj_en) sharing that, for one week only, the PDB will be the home of 123,456 biomolecular structures!

This number is, of course, more quirky and fun than the well-rounded and incredible 100,000 structure milestone from two years ago, but I couldn't resist taking a moment to offer congratulations to the community and comment on how we got there.

This year, the PDB celebrates its 45th birthday. The public repository was established in 1971, and for those interested in the history behind the PDB and the efforts that transformed a repository into an institution, Structure published a Perspective few years ago highlighting the community efforts that gave us what we have today.

Over the decades, the PDB saw its content and its role grow and diversify. In addition to archiving structural biology information, the international team behind these worldwide efforts organizes task forces that discuss issues and guidelines for different areas within structural biology. For example, the most recent task force brought together crystallographers from the world of small molecules and biomolecules for the first wwPDB/CCDC/D3R event. The PDB also invests a great deal into developing tools for structural biology, like an easy-to-use online validation service that generates the reports we're asking our authors to provide. This all ensures that structural biology information is vetted, validated, reproducible, discoverable, and accessible, and the community depends on the PDB to remain vigilant.

Working together as a community is what got us to where we are today, to 123,456 structures, all public and available to anyone to explore. How much has Structure contributed to this number? We're the proud publisher of more than 2,100 papers describing more than 4,900 biomolecular structures. This year alone, more than 600 structures have been disclosed on our pages, including the 11 structures released this week (described in papers here, here, here, and here) that pushed the scale toward 123,456.

It took 45 years to get to 123,456, leaving me to wonder—how long will it take to get us to 1,234,567? Of course, whether there are 1,234,567 biomolecular structures that are worth solving is open for debate. For example, an analysis done a few years ago suggested that, unlike in the early days, where almost every structure represented a new protein family, only about 5% of structures released in 2012 could boast of being representatives of a protein family we have not seen before. But, as the authors of this analysis rightly point out, and as all of us in the structural biology community know, there is much more work to be done.

And the journey will not be easy. The protein families that remain structurally uncharacterized represent a formidable challenge, given that they're a mix of protein families that keep structural biologists awake at night. Still, I hope to wake up one morning in the not-so-distant future to a happy, fun announcement that there are now 1,234,567 biomolecular structures for all of us to play with, admire, and enjoy.

I'll raise my first morning cup of coffee and drink to that!