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

Molecular Graphics

• stick, ball-and-stick, CPK, ribbon, pipe-and-plank, and nucleotide display styles
• molecular surfaces
• highly intuitive rotation, translation, and scaling with the mouse
• Side View for adjusting clipping planes and scaling
• interactive color editing in various color spaces (RGB, CMYK, etc.) with transparency
• ability to save high-resolution images for presentation and publication
• stereo (side-by-side and time-sequential)

(More features...)

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Gallery Sample

Binding Site Similarity

β-1,4-glycanase (gold, PDB 1exp) and cellobiohydrolase I (cyan, PDB 1cel) have similar glucose-binding sites but different folds. Ribbons were slimmed with Ribbon Style Editor and the title and captions were added with 2D Labels (see image how-to). (More samples...)