Structural biology has continued to advance over the past decades, owing to the development of improved and new technologies. The launch of Nature Structural Biology (NSB) in 1994 provided a much-needed avenue for the dissemination of these advances. This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the journal, now named Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. Although it has expanded far beyond the initial scope, it continues to faithfully serve the structural biology community as a venue to showcase some of their most impactful developments.

In the early 1990s, structural biology relied on protein crystallography as the main experimental technique. Application of this method underpinned the landmark determination of the first protein structure, myoglobin, published in 1958 (ref. 1). Progress in X-ray crystallography, however, experienced a sluggish pace over the subsequent two decades, primarily owing to the lack of availability of instrumentation.