The Steitz Center for Structural Biology (SCSB) established at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) in July 2010 is dedicated to macromolecular structural biology research. Tomas A. Steitz, winner of Nobel Prize in chemistry (2009) is the director of SCSB who devoted most of his research to the determination of structure and function of ribosomal large subunit. The SCSB is collaborating research activities in structural biology with Steitz laboratory at Yale university in United States. For this cooperation, the SCSB at GIST was set up with one of the most advanced research facilities in the world.

We will continuously extend the SCSB to improve the limited techniques of primary bio-macromolecular structure determination. In addition, we will set at SCSB research facilities for in bimolecular NMR, Cryo-EM and Computational biology fields to make it a multidisciplinary research center to meet the challenges in bio-macromolecular research.

Also, we will establish the most advanced infrastructure for obtaining different research projects and to train graduate and post-doctoral researchers in combination with the exchange of researchers with other institutes. Ultimately, we will have successful research and advanced human resources in the area of structural biology. Our general goal is to understand the biological functions of macromolecules in terms of their detailed molecular structure. Of particular interest are the molecular mechanisms including those proteins and nucleic acids which are involved in the central dogma of molecular biology (DNA replication, transcription, translation and genetic recombination) to achieve their biological function. Virtually all aspects of the maintenance, rearrangement and expression of information stored in the genome involve interactions between proteins and nucleic acids. As the area of drug discovery is based on details of the target structures, these research outcomes will be directly applicable for developing new antibiotics or anti-cancers.