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Sensing ceramides by CYSLTR2 and P2RY6 to aggravate atherosclerosis. Zhang S, Lin H et al. Nature. 2025 May 8;641(8062):476-485.

Structure of mitochondrial pyruvate carrier and its inhibition mechanism. He Z, Zhang J et al. Nature. 2025 May 1;641(8061):250–257.

Structures and mechanism of the human mitochondrial pyruvate carrier. Liang J, Shi J et al. Nature. 2025 May 1;641(8061):258-265.

Metabolic signaling of ceramides through the FPR2 receptor inhibits adipocyte thermogenesis. Lin H, Ma C et al. Science. 2025 May 1;388(6746):eado4188.

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March 6, 2025

Chimera production release 1.19 is now available, fixing the ability to fetch structures from the PDB (details...).

December 25, 2024

The RBVI wishes you a safe and happy holiday season! See our 2024 card and the gallery of previous cards back to 1985.

October 14, 2024

Planned downtime: The Chimera and ChimeraX websites, web services (Blast Protein, Modeller, ...) and cgl.ucsf.edu e-mail will be unavailable starting Monday, Oct 14 10 AM PDT, continuing throughout the week and potentially the weekend (Oct 14-20).

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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.

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

dopamine receptor with axes and planes

Axes and Planes

Axes, planes, and centroids can be calculated from sets of atoms using the Axes/Planes/Centroids tool or the command define. Axes can be shown as cylinders, planes as disks, and centroids as spheres, and any of these can be used in distance and angle measurements.

For example, the figure shows the dopamine D3 receptor and bound inhibitor (PDB entry 3pbl) as modeled into the membrane in the OPM database. The planes of the inner and outer membrane boundaries are shown as transparent blue and red disks, respectively. The protein ribbon is rainbow-colored from blue at the N-terminus to red at the C-terminus, and the axis of each helix is shown as a cylinder of matching color. The axis of the red helix forms an angle of 15.1° with the membrane and comes within 3.5 Å of the inner boundary. The yellow and orange helices are nearly antiparallel (crossing angle 5.9°). The average (minimum, maximum) distance of inhibitor atoms from the outer boundary is 7.9 (5.1, 11.7) Å.

(More features...)

Gallery Sample

Wasabi Receptor

The image shows the structure of the human TRPA1 ion channel (wasabi receptor) determined by electron cryo-microscopy, Protein Data Bank entry 3j9p. The four subunits of the tetramer are shown as ribbons in different colors over a dark-to-light gradient background. (More samples...)


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