Guy Salvesen and Giovanni Paternostro have spoken with Adam Godzik. Adam is the Bruce D. and Nancy B. Varner Presidential Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at the UC Riverside School of Medicine, Division of Biomedical Sciences. Adam was closely involved from an early stage in CASP, as a participant, and in the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG), one of the centers supported by the Protein Structure Initiative (PSI).
He sent the following comments:
I think that the success of PDB was driven by it being built by the crystallographic community itself, it was an effort from within, not from outside. It became widely accepted relatively early in its history, definitely before I got into the field.
There was another development in bioinformatics that enabled AlphaFold – residue-residue interaction predictions from MSA (work of Debora S. Marks, for instance https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0028766) or a more general contact map prediction field with quite a long history. This is really how AlphaFold works – predicting a contact map from MSA and then refining it.
Clustering of large databases to get manageable and uniform datasets started from UniProt90 and Uniprot50 and our CD-HIT program before it was taken over by Uniclust. UniProt50 and Uniprot90, now done with MMseqs2, still remain a main source of representative protein sequences.