In December 2007 Emerald BioStructures, Inc. (Bainbridge Island, WA) and the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute initiated a collaboration on Structural Genomics for Infectious Disease. A consortium of four institutions (Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, Emerald BioStructures, University of Washington and Pacific Northwest Laboratory) was formed known as the Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Diseases

Emerald BioStructures’ role in the SSGCID is to construct and expression test genes in bacterial and cell-free systems, to produce and purify proteins in large scale; to crystallize and pre-screen protein crystals before they are sent for data collection at synchrotron beam-lines, and develop protein models using the resulting data. Emerald BioStructures will determine the structure of 75-100 new targets per year over a period of five years

SSGCID is also committed to providing structural genomics service to the research community and publicly disseminating all structure information and material resources generated as part of the NIAID contract (federal contract no. HHSN272200700057C). Researchers are encouraged to nominate targets for structure determination at www.ssgcid.org