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

Coloring by Density

A surface can be colored by density or other volume data. In the image, the surface is clipped and capped, and only the cap is colored by density. Different coloring schemes can be applied.

(More features...)

---

Gallery Sample

Annotated Green Fluorescent Protein

BILD format was used in Chimera to annotate the barrel structure of green fluorescent protein with its centroid, major axis (red arrow), and an enclosing cylinder (shown with green hoops). The BILD file green.bild was generated with the python program green.py using the coordinates in green.pdb. Gallery entry courtesy of Mike Ess, Yeast Resource Center, University of Washington. (More samples...)