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Polymerase trapping as the mechanism of H5 highly pathogenic avian influenza virus genesis. Funk M, Spronken MI et al. Science. 2026 Mar 12;391(6790):eadr6632.
Identification of an allosteric site on the E3 ligase adapter cereblon. Dippon VN, Rizvi Z et al. Nature. 2026 Mar 12;651(8105):482-490.
Structural remodeling of the mitochondrial protein biogenesis machinery under proteostatic stress. Ehses K, López-Alonso JP et al. Sci Adv. 2026 Mar 6;12(10):eaed3579.
Structures of Ostα/β reveal a unique fold and bile acid transport mechanism. Yang X, Cui N et al. Nature. 2026 Mar 5;651(8104):260–267.
Structure and mechanism of the human bile acid transporter OSTα-OSTβ. Wang K, Fan J et al. Nature. 2026 Mar 5;651(8104):251–259
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December 25, 2025
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September 22, 2025
Mac users may wish to defer upgrading to MacOS Tahoe. Currently on that OS the Chimera graphics window is shifted so that it covers the command and status lines.
March 6, 2025
Chimera production release 1.19 is now available, fixing the ability to fetch structures from the PDB (1.19 release notes).
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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 in addition to nearly all the capabilities of Chimera (details...).
Chimera is no longer under active development. Chimera development was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (P41-GM103311) that ended in 2018.
Feature Highlight
There are several ways to superimpose structures in Chimera:
•
MatchMaker performs a fit after automatically identifying
which residues should be paired.
Pairing uses both sequence and secondary structure,
allowing similar structures to be superimposed even when
their sequence similarity is low to undetectable.
The figure shows five distantly related proteins
(pairwise sequence identities <25%) from the
SCOP WD40 superfamily before and after
MatchMaker superposition with default parameters.
•
Structures can be matched
using a pre-existing sequence alignment.
•
The exact atoms to pair can be specified with the
match command.
This works on any type of structure, while the preceding methods
apply only to peptide and nucleotide chains.
•
Structures can be superimposed manually by
activating/deactivating them for motion and
using the mouse.
Gallery Sample
Large ribosomal RNA is shown with individual bases depicted using solvent excluded molecular surfaces. Bases A, C, G, U are colored red, yellow, green, and blue. The surfaces were made with the Chimera multiscale tool in combination with the nucleic acid blobs plug-in. The image was raytraced using POVray.
Protein Data Bank model 1s72.
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