UCSF Chimera is a highly extensible program for interactive visualization and analysis of molecular structures and related data, including density maps, supramolecular assemblies, sequence alignments, docking results, trajectories, and conformational ensembles. High-quality images and animations can be generated. Chimera includes complete documentation and several tutorials, and can be downloaded free of charge for academic, government, nonprofit, and personal use. Chimera is developed by the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics (RBVI), supported in part by the National Institutes of Health (P41-GM103311).

UCSF ChimeraX (or simply ChimeraX) is the next-generation molecular visualization program from the RBVI, following UCSF Chimera.

Feature Highlight

Fly-through Animation

The fly command can animate a flight through molecular structures. Click the example image to fly along the RNA being copied by rotavirus RNA polymerase (PDB 2r7r), an enzyme that replicates the 11 segments of viral RNA. See a video showing how this animation was made.

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Gallery Sample

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...)