UCSF Chimera is a program for the interactive visualization and analysis of molecular structures and related data, including density maps, trajectories, and sequence alignments. It is available free of charge for noncommercial use. Commercial users, please see Chimera commercial licensing.

We encourage Chimera users to try ChimeraX for much better performance with large structures, as well as other major advantages and completely new features. ChimeraX includes a significant subset of Chimera features (with more to come, see the missing features list) and is under active development. Users may choose to use both programs, and it is fine to have both installed.

Chimera is no longer under active development, and is only updated for critical maintenance. Chimera development was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (P41-GM103311) that ended in 2018.

Feature Highlight

Molecular Graphics

• stick, ball-and-stick, CPK, ribbon, pipe-and-plank, and nucleotide display styles
• molecular surfaces
• highly intuitive rotation, translation, and scaling with the mouse
• Side View for adjusting clipping planes and scaling
• interactive color editing in various color spaces (RGB, CMYK, etc.) with transparency
• ability to save high-resolution images for presentation and publication
• stereo (side-by-side and time-sequential)

(More features...)

---

Gallery Sample

Clathrin

This image of a clathrin cage uses flat shading and edge highlighting. It is a copy of a PDB molecule of the month image made by Graham Johnson and Dave Goodsell. David Goodsell pioneered this visualization style. This image was made with the Multiscale tool, silhouette edging, and surface lighting turned off.

Protein Data Bank model 1xi4.

(More samples...)