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Featured Citations

Illuminating the molecular basis of human daylight vision. Schmidt SL, Dostal J et al. Science. 2026 Jun 25;392(6805):eadz3624.

Vaccination generates broadly cross-neutralizing antibodies to the HIV Env apex. Guenaga J, Ádori M et al. Nature. 2026 Jun 18;654(8119):777–785.

Induction of broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies by a two-step mechanism informs vaccine design. Skelly AN, Gristick HB et al. Science. 2026 Jun 18;392(6804):eaec6396.

Cryo-EM reveals a right-handed double-helix dimer architecture of PCDH15. Liang X, Pathak R et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2026 Jun 16;123(24):e2607573123.

Structure of the mouse cytoplasmic lattice. Chi P, Wang X et al. Nature. 2026 Jun 10;654(8118):523–531.

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News

June 11, 2026

The ChimeraX 1.12 production release is available! See the change log for what's new.

May 7, 2026

The ChimeraX 1.12 release candidate is available – please try it and report any issues. See the change log for what's new.

December 25, 2025

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The RBVI wishes you a safe and happy holiday season! See our 2025 card and the gallery of previous cards back to 1985.

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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.

Bluesky logo ChimeraX on Bluesky: @chimerax.ucsf.edu

Feature Highlight

mitochondrial import receptor subunit TOMM40

AlphaFold Fetch

AlphaFold is an artificial intelligence method for predicting protein structures. With the AlphaFold tool or command, ChimeraX can search for and load predicted structures from the freely available AlphaFold Database, automatically coloring them by confidence value:

  • 100
    to 90
    – high accuracy
  • 90
    to 70
    – backbone accuracy
  • 70
    to 50
    – low confidence, caution
  • 50
    to 0
    – should not be interpreted, may be disordered

The figure shows the predicted structure of UniProt entry TOM40_HUMAN, a channel protein needed to import other proteins into mitochondria. See the command file tom40.cxc for fetching data and other setup (background color, etc.).

Opening a sequence from UniProt also opens a dialog in which its annotations or “features” can be clicked to highlight those regions in both the sequence and the associated 3D structure. The low-confidence part of this structure (orange and red) maps to compositionally biased and likely disordered regions near the N-terminus of the sequence.

More features...

Example Image

transducin switch regions

G-Protein Switch Regions

The GDP- and GTP-bound conformations of the transducin α-subunit (1tag and 1tnd, respectively) differ primarily in three regions, termed switch 1, switch 2, and switch 3. The structures have been superimposed with matchmaker and shown as cartoons, with “empty” outlines where the structures are almost the same (for simplicity, only one conformation's outlines are shown). The GTP analog GTPγS is displayed as spheres color-coded by heteroatom. For 2D labels and image setup other than structure orientation, see the command file switch.cxc.

More images...



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