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Featured Citations

Structural basis of supercoiling-induced CRISPR-Cas9 off-target activity. Smith QM, Whittle S et al. Nature. 2026 May 14;653(8114):627–635.

B cell imprinting in children impairs antibodies to the haemagglutinin stalk. Sun J, Jo G et al. Nature. 2026 May 14;653(8114):528–537.

Structures of Marburgvirus glycoprotein and its complex with NPC1 receptor. Ye G, Bu F et al. Nature. 2026 May 14;653(8114):621–626.

Heart-nosed bat alphacoronaviruses use human CEACAM6 to enter cells. Gallo G, Di Nardo A et al. Nature. 2026 May 7;653(8113):180–189.

Rapid directed evolution guided by protein language models and epistatic interactions. Tran VQ, Nemeth M et al. Science. 2026 May 7;392(6798):eaea1820.

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News

May 7, 2026

The ChimeraX 1.12 release candidate is available – please try it and report any issues. See the change log for what's new.

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.

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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

4hhb ambient lighting

Ambient Occlusion Molecular Surfaces

Several lighting modes are available, including ambient occlusion. The image shows hemoglobin (PDB 4hhb) with the four chains shown as surfaces of different colors and heme residues as spheres. The command lighting soft or the Graphics icon computer generated image can be used to turn on ambient shadowing from 64 directions. The command lighting gentle gives a similar result, except tuned to emphasize larger indentations.

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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.

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