The goal of the TB Structural Genomics Consortium is to determine the structures of potential drug targets in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. The development of novel drug therapies against tuberculosis are particularly important given the growing problem of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis.
The fully sequenced genome of M. tuberculosis has allowed scientists to clone many of these protein targets into expression vectors for purification and structure determination by X-ray crystallography.  Studies have identified a number of target proteins for structure determination, including extracellular proteins that may be involved in pathogenesis, iron-regulatory proteins, current drug targets, and proteins predicted to have novel folds. So far, structures have been determined for 708 of the proteins encoded by M. tuberculosis.