Since a large part of the protein structure prediction problem is that structure determination is much slower than sequence discovery, I thought I'd try to graph any data on sequences vs time and structures vs time to visualize that trend.

The Protein Data Bank has a nice graph for protein structures vs time. Unfortunately I can't find any similar data for sequences vs time.

For sequences data, the NCBI non-redundant protein database seems ideal off the top of my head since it aggregates several different large databases and removes identical sequences. The only way I know how to get the number of sequences in the nr database is to BLAST a protein and look at the report header. Does anyone know an easier way to get that type of high level information from NCBI's databases?

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