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Small molecules restore mutant mitochondrial DNA polymerase activity. Valenzuela S, Zhu X et al. Nature. 2025 Jun 12;642(8067):501–507.

PLA2G15 is a BMP hydrolase and its targeting ameliorates lysosomal disease. Nyame K, Xiong J et al. Nature. 2025 Jun 12;642(8067):474–483.

Complex water networks visualized by cryogenic electron microscopy of RNA. Kretsch RC, Li S et al. Nature. 2025 Jun 5;642(8066):250–259.

Structural basis for target DNA cleavage and guide RNA processing by CRISPR-Casλ2. Omura SN, Alfonse LE et al. Commun Biol. 2025 Jun 5;8(1):876.

BRAF oncogenic mutants evade autoinhibition through a common mechanism. Lavoie H, Jin T et al. Science. 2025 May 29;388(6750):eadp2742.

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News

May 7, 2025

The ChimeraX 1.10 release candidate is available – please try it and report any issues. See the change log for what's new.

March 19, 2025

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UCSF ChimeraX: Tools for structure building and analysis is one of the 10 most cited papers published in Protein Science in 2023!

March 1, 2025

Bluesky logo Follow UCSF ChimeraX on BlueSky! @chimerax.ucsf.edu

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June 24, 2025

PDB101 1-hr online tutorial: Introduction to molecular animation at 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific: (requires registration)


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

multichannel 3D image of hiPSCs from AICS

Multichannel Light Microscopy

3D images and time series from multichannel optical microscopy are shown in the Volume Viewer tool, with easy access to hiding/showing individual channels, changing their colors, and adjusting threshold levels with the mouse. The menu of style options includes “volume” (translucent blobs, as in the image), surface, mesh, maximum intensity projection, single plane, and orthoplanes. For convenience, the step size, region bounds, and display style of different channels of the same dataset are coupled, in that changing the setting of one channel automatically changes it for the others.

The image shows human induced pluripotent stem cells, with plasma membrane in violet red, EGFP-tagged fibrillarin (as a marker for nucleolus) in yellow, and DNA (nucleus) in turquoise. The data are publicly available from the Allen Cell Explorer website, dataset: AICS-14_0.

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Example Image

neuraminidase flowers

Potassium Channel-Calmodulin Complex

KCNQ1 is the pore-forming subunit of a cardiac potassium channel. It binds to calmodulin, and mutations in either of these proteins can cause congenital long QT syndrome, a dangerous propensity for irregular heartbeats. In the image, a structure of the KCNQ1/calmodulin complex (PDB 5vms) has been assembled into the native tetrameric form with the sym command. The view is from the cytoplasmic side, with KCNQ1 shown as surfaces, calmodulin as cartoons, and calcium ions as balls. A pastel palette from ColorBrewer has been used to color the surfaces, darkened with color modify for the cartoons, and “rotated” 45° in hue for the ions. See the command file colormod.cxc.

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