Some of the most common support calls we get are from users who are not sure how to use a particular feature in MacVector and would appreciate having someone walk through the steps with them. In many of these cases, it turns out that we have published tutorials that have exactly the information they are looking for, but it wasn’t obvious where to find them.
When you install MacVector, it usually gets installed in a folder in the system /Applications/ folder e.g. MacVector 12.6 can be found in the /Applications/MacVector 12.6/ folder. Inside that folder, you will find a folder called /Documentation/. This has electronic versions of the User Guide (MacVector User Guide.pdf) and the Getting Started Guide (GettingStartedGuide.pdf) along with a number of technical “Read Me” files for many of the 3rd party algorithms, plus the following Tutorials;
Align To Reference – Sequence Confirmation Tutorial This shows how you can align one or more sequences (including chromatogram files and next generation sequencing FastQ files) against a reference sequence to confirm the sequence of the reference, look for SNPs in the aligned sequences or screen for successful mutagenesis clones.
Auto Annotation Tutorial This describes the functionality in MacVector that lets you automatically annotate a sequence based on a collection of existing sequences on your hard drive.
Click Cloning Tutorial A tutorial showing how you can create new constructs by simply clicking on restriction enzyme sites, copying fragments and pasting into target vectors.
Gateway+TOPO Tutorial A variant of click cloning using the popular Gateway and TOPO cloning strategies from Invitrogen.
Primer Design Tutorial Check this out to learn about how to use the new interactive Quicktest Primer interface to design primers and find matching primer pairs using Primer3.
Contig Assembly Tutorial A basic tutorial on how to use the add-on Assembler module to assemble sequences from ABI files using the popular phred/phrap/cross_match algorithms from the University of Washington.
NGS Reference Alignment Tutorial How to use the Assembler module to align millions of reads from next generation sequencing runs to genomes using the Bowtie algorithm.
You can also download the tutorials from the Downloads page of our web site.
All of the tutorials use sample sequence files that are found in the /Applications/MacVector 12.6/Tutorial Files/ folder. This folder does NOT contain the actual tutorials, just the sample sequence files – perhaps we need to change that as it does confuse many people.
If you’d like to see tutorials on other subjects, please comment on this blog or send an e-mail to support@macvector.com letting us know.
This is an article in a long running series of tips to help you get the most out of MacVector. If you want to get notified every time a new tip gets published, follow us @MacVector on twitter (or check the feed for the hashtag #101MacVectorTips) or like us on Facebook.