PRINCETON If you know the connection, the pictures hanging on the wall in Helen Bermans home go a long way in explaining what she does as a structural biologist.

There is a black-and-white photo of the Brooklyn Bridge. There is a picture by the Dutch printmaker M.C. Escher. And there is a collection of seashells arranged into columns, sorted by type. In Bermans mind they are linked by several factors, beauty and symmetry being just two of them.

But the real key lies in the fact that she has grouped them here at all. That is what she does. Berman puts things together. She amplifies the relationships between them, and oversees the archiving of their connections.

Bermans interest in bioinformatics methods for organizing and analyzing biological data has led to her crowning achievement, one she is known for even outside the cloistered world of structural biology, where she has spent her entire career.

This month, Berman received the American Society for Biochemistrys prestigious DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences. She won the award for her part and it is a large one in the creation of the RCSB Protein Data Bank, now housed at Rutgers University, where Berman is a professor with the chemistry department.

RCSB stands for Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics where collaboration is another key part of Bermans philosophy.

Used by scientists, researchers, doctoral students and pharmaceutical companies, among others, the Protein Data Bank (PDB) is the product of decades of scientific cooperation and sheer dogged work on Bermans side.

When the PDB began at a different location 42 years ago, it catalogued just seven structures of protein molecules. Today, there are over 90,000.

Ive learned to be very patient, said Berman during an interview at her home. What Im doing is not the same as making a scientific discovery. Its a very different kind of thing. You have to be patient, take into account that other people work differently and that certain things have to be embargoed for a while.

Ultimately, I was successful.

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Princeton scientist feted for her role in creating protein data bank