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Featured Citations

Termination of the integrated stress response. De Miguel C, Thorkelsson SR et al. Science. 2026 Feb 19;397(6787):eadw5137.

Bacteria deliver a microtubule-binding protein into mammalian cells to promote colonization. Costello MS, Neumann B et al. Science. 2026 Feb 19;391(6787):825-830.

Ribosomal RNA expansion segments mediate the oligomerization of inactive animal ribosomes. Schwarz A, Mueller M et al. Science. 2026 Feb 19;391(6787):eadr4287.

The allosteric landscape of the Src kinase. Beltran A, Naqvi MM et al. Sci Adv. 2026 Feb 13;12(7):eaea2726.

Causal modelling of gene effects from regulators to programs to traits. Ota M, Spence JP et al. Nature. 2026 Feb 12;650(8101):399–408.

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News

December 25, 2025

computer generated image
The RBVI wishes you a safe and happy holiday season! See our 2025 card and the gallery of previous cards back to 1985.

December 16, 2025

The ChimeraX 1.11 production release is available! See the change log for what's new.

November 21, 2025

The ChimeraX 1.11 release candidate is available – please try it and report any issues. See the change log for what's new. This will be the last release to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and its derivatives.

Previous news...

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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

mitochondrial import receptor subunit TOMM40

AlphaFold Fetch

AlphaFold is an artificial intelligence method for predicting protein structures. With the AlphaFold tool or command, ChimeraX can search for and load predicted structures from the freely available AlphaFold Database, automatically coloring them by confidence value:

  • 100
    to 90
    – high accuracy
  • 90
    to 70
    – backbone accuracy
  • 70
    to 50
    – low confidence, caution
  • 50
    to 0
    – should not be interpreted, may be disordered

The figure shows the predicted structure of UniProt entry TOM40_HUMAN, a channel protein needed to import other proteins into mitochondria. See the command file tom40.cxc for fetching data and other setup (background color, etc.).

Opening a sequence from UniProt also opens a dialog in which its annotations or “features” can be clicked to highlight those regions in both the sequence and the associated 3D structure. The low-confidence part of this structure (orange and red) maps to compositionally biased and likely disordered regions near the N-terminus of the sequence.

More features...

Example Image

potassium channel

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.

More images...



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