December 25, 2025
The RBVI wishes you a safe and happy holiday season!
See our
2025 card and the
gallery of previous cards back to 1985.
December 16, 2025
The ChimeraX 1.11 production release is
available! See the
change log
for what's new.
November 21, 2025
The ChimeraX 1.11 release candidate is
available –
please try it and report
any issues. See the
change log
for what's new.
This will be the last release to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and
its derivatives.
Previous news...
UCSF ChimeraX
UCSF ChimeraX (or simply ChimeraX)
is the next-generation molecular visualization program from the
Resource for Biocomputing,
Visualization, and Informatics (RBVI),
following UCSF Chimera.
ChimeraX can be downloaded free of charge
for academic, government, nonprofit, and personal use.
Commercial users, please see
ChimeraX commercial licensing.
ChimeraX is developed with support from National Institutes of Health R01-GM129325.
ChimeraX on Bluesky:
@chimerax.ucsf.edu
A “palette” or ordered series of colors
is used to color items sequentially
(rainbow)
or by values such as density. The ten chains in PDB
5o3l (paired tau filament)
have been colored with the commands shown as
2D labels
in the images. The first two examples at left use
predefined
palettes (credit to www.ColorBrewer.org, color specifications and designs
by Cynthia A. Brewer, Pennsylvania State University), whereas the third shows
specifying colors
individually.
More features...
KCNQ1 is the pore-forming subunit of a cardiac potassium channel.
It binds to calmodulin, and mutations in either of these proteins
can cause congenital long QT syndrome, a dangerous
propensity for irregular heartbeats.
In the image, a structure of the KCNQ1/calmodulin complex
(PDB 5vms)
has been assembled into the native tetrameric form with the
sym command.
The view is from the cytoplasmic side, with
KCNQ1 shown as surfaces, calmodulin as cartoons, and calcium ions as balls.
A pastel palette
from ColorBrewer
has been used to color the surfaces, darkened with
color modify
for the cartoons, and “rotated” 45° in hue for the ions.
See the command file colormod.cxc.
More images...