As the war against AIDS enters its third decade, pharmaceutical companies are continuing to develop new drugs aimed at thwarting this disease. Having the structural data at hand, and in a properly organized manner and fully searchable, is an essential tools for modern drug discovery and development. For this reason, there is a growing need for advanced bioinformatics tools and standardized structural protein data entry methods that enable researchers involved in drug discovery to use this structural data in order to design tomorrow's drugs. This open access (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) HIV structural database receives, annotates, archives, and distributes standardized 2-D and 3-D structural data for AIDS related protein molecules and their complexes with drugs. The data come from both the published literature and from direct contributions by industrial and other laboratories.

• The new NIST Standard Reference Database (HIV SRD 101) for AIDS research is now available. http://xpdb.nist.gov/hivsdb/hivsdb.html The database incorporates state-of-the-art annotation tools and techniques developed at NIST specifically to manage the information and its interoperability. This database contains the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of structural data for AIDS research. The database is being and can be updated very rapidly – an important feature in a rapidly moving area. The database is fully relational – it can be searched easily and completely in a very wide variety of ways to best serve the needs of the user. As such, this collection of annotated 3-D structures of HIV protease complexes with drugs is a major resource for the drug discovery community, the pharmaceutical industry, and the general bioscience community. Since the public release of the HIV SRD 101 by NIST on July 16, 2004, it has logged over 4.2 million hits - making it one of NIST's most successful data products. Also, the gap between 2-D and 3-D structural data has been bridged. This further enhances the value of HIV SRD 101. This is important because solving 3-D structures is a cost prohibitive process. Because of this economic hurdle, only a small number of the existing 2-D structures of HIV inhibitor chemical compounds have been determined in a 3-D format. As a result, the research and drug development community requires a data resource that would efficiently and accurately map 2-D and 3-D structural information.

• M. D. Prasanna, J. Vondrasek, A. Wlodawer, T. N. Bhat, “ Application of INChI to curate, index and query 3-D structures” 2004, Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics 2005, 60, 1-4.