In recent years, there are more and more cryo-EM papers coming out from China. And the number of structural biology groups who are using cryo-EM in China as the approach to study structures of bio-macromolecules are growing up quickly. China is becoming a large user also a large contributor of archived data in EMDB. To help scientists in China having an easier and faster access to EMDB, where the large size of electron microscopic density maps of macromolecular complexes are deposited, the committee of Cryo-Electron Microscopy Subsociety of The Biophysical Society of China made a decision in 2016 to make collaboration with EMBL-EBI and build a mirror site of EMDB in China. This project was started in the beginning of 2017, when the PI Prof. Fei Sun from Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with his colleagues from Computer Network and Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, visited EMBL-EBI in Cambridge UK (see the news : http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pdbe/about/news/em-archives-mirrors-china from EBI website). Now the EMDB-China site is supervised by Prof. Fei Sun in collaboration with Dr. Ardan Patwardhan in EMBL-EBI. The mirror site server is maintained by the colleagues in Computer Network and Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

   At the moment, all the released entry data in EMDB (ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/emdb) has been mirrored in EMDB-China (ftp://ftp.emdb-china.org/). And the mirror site is routinely updated every weekend. To help the users in China search and review entries in the mirror site, a website ( http://www.emdb-china.org/) has been built to provide a local service including searching, browsing, displaying and simple visualization. The local service of data deposition will be discussed further with EMBL-EBI for the future collaboration.

   Besides, another site of mirroring EMPIAR (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/pdbe/emdb/empiar/) has also been mirror in China (ftp://ftp.empiar-china.org/), which contains even larger size of raw images of biological samples and those raw data could not be possibly downloaded by the uses in China in most cases. This mirror site is routinely updated every month. A website to provide a local service of viewing and searching this mirrored site is now currently developing.