UCSF ChimeraX Early Access

UCSF ChimeraX is the next-generation visualization program from the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics at UC San Francisco, following UCSF Chimera.

Features

Compared to Chimera, ChimeraX has a more modern user interface, better graphics, and much faster handling of large structures. For more information, see:

ChimeraX Advantages, User Guide, Documentation Index, Change Log
UCSF ChimeraX: Meeting Modern Challenges in Visualization and Analysis. (Goddard et al., Prot Sci. 2018)
Integrative Modeling Demo (2016)
Structures at the Experimental Forefront (2016)
Next-Generation Graphics (2015)

Although similar in many aspects, ChimeraX is not backward compatible with Chimera and does not read Chimera session files.

Missing Features

While ChimeraX has several completely new features and other advantages, it will not substantially replace Chimera for some time. Current capabilities are somewhat limited and mostly implemented as commands only (not yet as graphical interfaces). Missing features relative to Chimera include calculation of axes/planes/centroids, dock prep, “worms” to show residue attributes, color key, per-model clipping, trajectory analysis other than simple playback, structure building, loop modeling, and many others. Chimera capabilities grew significantly over several years, and likewise, ChimeraX will contain more and more of these important features as development proceeds.

Downloads

Download is free for academic, government, nonprofit, and personal use; commercial users, please see licensing.
Using a newer computer (≤ 3 years old) is recommended for ChimeraX because it employs graphics features that require or work best on a recent system.
ChimeraX commands and their syntax may change.

Daily Builds
Production Releases
Platform Notes
Virtual Reality Notes

Daily Builds

Daily builds are generated automatically each night from the development source code (see the change log). While a given build may have unforeseen problems, these are often fixed by the next day.

Operating System	Distribution	Notes
Windows 10 64-bit	chimerax-daily.exe fetching build information...	Download is a Windows installer. Tested on Windows 10. See Windows notes below.
macOS 10.12 64-bit	chimerax-daily.dmg fetching build information...	Download is a disk image containing the application. Tested on macOS 10.12. This application does not run on 10.11 or older dues to operating system changes.
Generic Linux 64-bit	chimerax-daily.tar.gz fetching build information...	Download is a tarball of the chimerax application directory. ChimeraX executable is chimerax/bin/ChimeraX. Tested on Ubuntu 16.10 and Fedora 25. See Generic Linux notes below.
Ubuntu 16.04 (Linux) 64-bit	chimerax-daily.deb fetching build information...	Download is a Ubuntu 16.04 ucsf-chimerax-daily package. Install with: `sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/chimerax-daily.deb` ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax-daily.
Ubuntu 18.04 (Linux) 64-bit	chimerax-daily.deb fetching build information...	Download is a Ubuntu 18.04 ucsf-chimerax-daily package. Install with: `sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/chimerax-daily.deb` ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax-daily.
Red Hat/CentOS 7 (Linux) 64-bit	chimerax-daily.rpm fetching build information...	Download is a Red Hat/CentOS 7 ucsf-chimerax-daily package. Install with: `sudo yum install ~/Downloads/chimerax-daily.rpm` ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax-daily.

Production Releases

Production releases are snapshots of the application that have been gently tested. They are provided so that users can fetch the same version of the application over time. To try out the latest features, please use the daily builds.

Release 0.9 (June 6, 2019)

Release 0.9 new features include:

Tabbed toolbar
More presets
Fetch sequence from UniProt
AL2CO conservation in Sequence Viewer
Interface to Modeller comparative modeling
Coloring by attribute
Support for DICOM medical imaging data
ViewDockX reads Autodock Vina and GOLD results

See the change log for a more complete list.

Operating System	Distribution	Notes
Windows 10 64-bit	ChimeraX-0.9.exe built: 2019-06-06 16:32:05 PDT committed: 2019-06-06 14:59:01 PDT size: 390.4 MiB md5: 289a88d9c94669f429486db6c23fb202	Download is a Windows installer. Tested on Windows 10. See Windows notes below.
macOS 10.12 64-bit	ChimeraX-0.9.dmg built: 2019-06-06 17:01:20 PDT committed: 2019-06-06 14:59:01 PDT size: 264.1 MiB md5: c5c514c87898dfb0bbf3f6b7d731b8b3	Download is a disk image containing the application. Tested on macOS 10.12. This application does not run on 10.11 or older dues to operating system changes.
Generic Linux 64-bit	ChimeraX-0.9.tar.gz built: 2019-06-06 17:37:04 PDT committed: 2019-06-06 14:59:01 PDT size: 290.4 MiB md5: ab3a1a59814e1d7ce6868153d60be409	Download is a tarball of the chimerax application directory. ChimeraX executable is chimerax/bin/ChimeraX. Tested on Ubuntu 16.10 and Fedora 25. See Linux notes below.
Ubuntu 16.04 (Linux) 64-bit	ucsf-chimerax_0.9_amd64.deb built: 2019-06-06 17:22:06 PDT committed: 2019-06-06 14:59:01 PDT size: 216.6 MiB md5: da30876ecb3cbeb14407ac43a3f9159d	Download is a Ubuntu 16.04 ucsf-chimerax package. Install with: `sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/ucsf-chimerax_0.9_amd64.deb` ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax.
Ubuntu 18.04 (Linux) 64-bit	ucsf-chimerax_0.9_amd64.deb built: 2019-06-06 17:12:02 PDT committed: 2019-06-06 14:59:01 PDT size: 220.0 MiB md5: 2b898a03dbe029abb4c187ad58f01a7f	Download is a Ubuntu 18.04 ucsf-chimerax package. Install with: `sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/ucsf-chimerax_0.9_amd64.deb` ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax.
Red Hat/CentOS 7 (Linux) 64-bit	ucsf-chimerax-0.9-1.el7.x86_64.rpm built: 2019-06-06 17:29:52 PDT committed: 2019-06-06 14:59:01 PDT size: 220.1 MiB md5: 2cd276b685f2f973fb184c9e1ed8679b	Download is a Red Hat/CentOS 7 ucsf-chimerax package. Install with: `sudo yum install ~/Downloads/ucsf-chimerax-0.9-1.el7.x86_64.rpm` ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax.

Older Releases

Generic Linux Notes: The Generic Linux version does not run on Red Hat/CentOS 7, for those you need to install the CentOS 7 rpm. The Generic Linux version of ChimeraX is compiled on Debian 8 using gcc 4.9. It also runs on Ubuntu 16.04 and later versions. However, we recommend installing the debian package (.deb file) for your version of Ubuntu so all of the prerequistes are installed. Other Linux distributions have not been tested and might require additional libraries to be installed.
Windows Notes: ChimeraX requires Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 and 2017, which is typically already present on computers with up-to-date patches. In the future, this will be included as part of the installer.
ChemOffice 2002 supplies an ancient version of the OpenGL library that prevents ChimeraX from starting up. To fix it, you'll need to remove or rename its opengl32.dll file; typically found in "C:\Program Files (x86)\ChemOffice2002\Common\DLLs\opengl32.dll".