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Recent Citations

Cryo-EM structure of the vaccinia virus entry fusion complex reveals a multicomponent fusion machinery. Lin CS, Li CA et al. Sci Adv. 2026 Jan 16;12(3):eaec0254.

Structural insights into the activation mechanism of the human metabolite receptor HCAR1. Gao M, Zang S et al. Sci Signal. 2026 Jan 6;19(919):eadw1483.

Crystal structure of Methanococcus jannaschii dihydroorotase with substrate bound. Vitali J, Nix JC et al. Acta Crystallogr F Struct Biol Commun. 2026 Jan 1;82(Pt 1):23-31.

Correlation between solvation free energy and solute-solvent interaction energy in energy representation theory. Maruyama Y, Matubayasi N. J Phys Chem B. 2025 Dec 25;129(51):13230-13241.

Structural snapshots capture nucleotide release at the μ-opioid receptor. Khan S, Tyson AS et al. Nature. 2025 Dec 18;648(8094):755–763.

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News

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.

September 22, 2025

Mac users may wish to defer upgrading to MacOS Tahoe. Currently on that OS the Chimera graphics window is shifted so that it covers the command and status lines.

March 6, 2025

Chimera production release 1.19 is now available, fixing the ability to fetch structures from the PDB (details...).

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Please note that UCSF Chimera is legacy software that is no longer being developed or supported. Users are strongly encouraged to try UCSF ChimeraX, which is under active development.
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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

EM map morph

Morphing Density Maps

Related density maps can be compared by morphing from one to the other. Several intermediate maps are generated by interpolating between the starting and ending maps. The morph can be viewed interactively and recorded as a movie. The contour level can be adjusted automatically to keep the enclosed volume constant throughout the morph, and other aspects of map display can be adjusted with Volume Viewer.

(More features...)

Gallery Sample

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Cavity and Tunnel Detection

Side-by-side views of a potassium channel structure (Protein Data Bank entry 1bl8) showing different approaches to cavity detection. On the left are molecular surface patches corresponding to the structure's two largest pockets by MS volume in the Computed Atlas of Surface Topography of proteins (CASTp) database. On the right is a tunnel in blue identified by the MolAxis server. Simple editing converted MolAxis output into a BILD file for display in Chimera. (More samples...)


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