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Polymerase trapping as the mechanism of H5 highly pathogenic avian influenza virus genesis. Funk M, Spronken MI et al. Science. 2026 Mar 12;391(6790):eadr6632.

Identification of an allosteric site on the E3 ligase adapter cereblon. Dippon VN, Rizvi Z et al. Nature. 2026 Mar 12;651(8105):482-490.

Structural remodeling of the mitochondrial protein biogenesis machinery under proteostatic stress. Ehses K, López-Alonso JP et al. Sci Adv. 2026 Mar 6;12(10):eaed3579.

Structures of Ostα/β reveal a unique fold and bile acid transport mechanism. Yang X, Cui N et al. Nature. 2026 Mar 5;651(8104):260–267.

Structure and mechanism of the human bile acid transporter OSTα-OSTβ. Wang K, Fan J et al. Nature. 2026 Mar 5;651(8104):251–259

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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 (1.19 release notes).

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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

mda p08648 limit 4 percent 50

Find and Summarize Structures for a Sequence

One use of Multidomain Assembler is to set up comparative modeling and concatenation of existing structures to generate a full-length model of a multidomain protein. However, even without model-building, the byproduct is also useful: a visual summary of the structures available for a query sequence, optionally filtered by criteria such as BLAST score and % identity, laid out horizontally in approximate N→C order relative to the query. Overlapping hits are stacked vertically, and segments without structural coverage are indicated with spheres. By default, the multiple sequence alignment of the hits to the query is also displayed.

The figure shows the results of command:
    mda p08648 ~/Desktop/MDA limit 4 percent 50
with sequence mismatches in red and molecules other than the hit chains in blue. Text and pointers have been added with 2D Labels.

Multidomain Assembler is described in a paper.

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Gallery Sample

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Thermosome

Thermosomes are hollow balls inside which proteins are folded. They are found in the cytosol of eukaryotes and in archaea. Eukaryotic thermosomes have 8 different protein subunits, while archaeal ones are composed of one, two or three different proteins. The one shown from Thermoplasma acidophilum has two distinct proteins colored blue and yellow, each present in 8 copies. The two proteins have 60% sequence identity and are very similar in structure. One monomer is shown as a ribbon. Actin and tubulin are folded by eukaryotic thermosomes.

Protein Data Bank model 1a6d.

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