UCSF Chimera is a program for the interactive visualization and analysis of molecular structures and related data, including density maps, trajectories, and sequence alignments. High-quality images and animations can be generated. Chimera includes complete documentation and is free of charge for academic, government, nonprofit, and personal use. Chimera development was supported by the National Institutes of Health (P41-GM103311).

UCSF ChimeraX is the next-generation molecular visualization program from the RBVI, following UCSF Chimera. We encourage Chimera users to try ChimeraX for much better performance with large structures, as well as other major advantages. ChimeraX replaces a significant subset of Chimera features, includes several completely new features, and is under active development. Users may certainly choose to use both programs, and it is fine to have both installed.

Feature Highlight

Space Navigator Input Device

Space Navigator is an inexpensive ($60) USB input device from 3Dconnexion for moving and rotating models in 3 dimensions. This animation (8 Mb) shows docking a phage enzyme (PDB 1v0e) into an electron microscopy map (EMDB 1333) using a space navigator and mouse. Works with Windows and Mac Chimera versions (details).

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Gallery Sample

Cavity and Tunnel Detection

Side-by-side views of a potassium channel structure (Protein Data Bank entry 1bl8) showing different approaches to cavity detection. On the left are molecular surface patches corresponding to the structure's two largest pockets by MS volume in the Computed Atlas of Surface Topography of proteins (CASTp) database. On the right is a tunnel in blue identified by the MolAxis server. Simple editing converted MolAxis output into a BILD file for display in Chimera. (More samples...)