Chimera is a highly extensible, interactive molecular graphics program. It is available free of charge for academic, government, non-profit, and home use. Chimera development is funded by the NIH National Center for Research Resources (grant P41-RR01081).

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Feature Overview

Advanced Display solid and mesh surfaces stick, ball-and-stick, CPK, and ribbon representations that can be combined with surfaces interactive rotatability of all display types interactive color editing in various color spaces (RGB, CMYK, etc.) including transparency movable lenses in which the display differs from the surroundings ability to save high-resolution image files for presentation and publication
Basic Manipulations highly intuitive translation, scaling, and "spaceball" rotation with the mouse Side View tool for adjusting clipping planes and scaling significant functionality available through menus a rich set of commands, including most of those used in Midas and several new commands easy specification of entire chains and handling of multiple models within a single PDB file
Chemical Knowledge determination of atom types in arbitrary molecules (not just standard residues) selection of atoms and bonds for further operations according to element, atom type, functional group, and amino acid category hydrogen addition hydrogen bond identification
Documentation full online manuals: User's Guide and Programmer's Guide extensive help, both "balloon" help and display of HTML manual pages
Extensions: Some Examples viewing 3D data sets as solid or mesh contours or transparent solids (Volume Viewer) protein structural superposition (MinRMS and AlignPlot) viewing multiple sequence alignments along with structural alignments ( Multalign Viewer and MSF Viewer) convenient examination of docked molecules output by DOCK (ViewDock) capability for sharing modeling sessions among distant researchers (Collaboratory)

Chimera is the successor to UCSF Midas and MidasPlus; however, it has been completely redesigned to maximize extensibility and leverage advances in hardware.

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