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

Space Navigator Input Device

Space Navigator is an inexpensive ($60) USB input device from 3Dconnexion for moving and rotating models in 3 dimensions. This animation (8 Mb) shows docking a phage enzyme (PDB 1v0e) into an electron microscopy map (EMDB 1333) using a space navigator and mouse. Works with Windows and Mac Chimera versions (details).

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Gallery Sample

Clathrin

This image of a clathrin cage uses flat shading and edge highlighting. It is a copy of a PDB molecule of the month image made by Graham Johnson and Dave Goodsell. David Goodsell pioneered this visualization style. This image was made with the Multiscale tool, silhouette edging, and surface lighting turned off.

Protein Data Bank model 1xi4.

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