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

Topography

Values in a plane of volume data can be shown as heights normal to the plane (a topographic map). When a single plane is displayed with Volume Viewer, the command topography will plot the values as heights in a surface.

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Gallery Sample

Loop Interactions

The image shows interactions of the delta-1 loop with the rest of hepatitis C virus RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (Protein Data Bank entry 1quv). Loop residues in contact with the rest of the structure (van der Waals overlap ≥ 0.01 Å) are displayed as sticks; interacting surface atoms are shown as red patches. (More samples...)