Funded largely by a NIH P50 center grant, the TB structural genomics crystallization facility was created to serve essentially two purposes:
The knowledge of accurate molecular structures is a prerequisite for rational drug design and for structure based functional studies to aid the development of effective therapeutic agents and drugs. Crystallography can reliably provide the answer to many structure related questions, from global folds to atomic details of molecular interaction. The price for the high accuracy of crystallographic structures is that a good crystal must be found, and that only limited information about the molecule's dynamic behavior is available from one single diffraction experiment.
Go here to learn more about crystallography.