General musings from the MacVector team about sequence analysis, molecular biology, the Mac in general and of course your favorite sequence analysis app for the Mac!

Author Archives: Chris

Importing features from a Genome Browser

By Chris | Published: May 14, 2012

One of the new features in MacVector 12.6 is the ability to annotate sequences based on the features stored in GFF/BED/GFT files that many Genome Browsers will export data as. MacVector 12.6 will annotate an empty or annotated sequence with the features stored within these files. BED, GFF, GTF, and GFF3 formats GFF, GTF, GFF3 [...]

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ASM2012: San Francisco

By Chris | Published: May 14, 2012

We’ll be at the 112th ASM meeting in San Francisco this year from June 16 – 19, 2012. Come visit us if you are at the show. Our booth at the ASM will be 936. We’ll be demoing MacVector 12.6 which will be released about that date. You’ll also be able to pick up demo [...]

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Showing features as bases or a translation in a plasmid map

By Chris | Published: April 5, 2012

Everybody has different tastes and giving everybody identical plasmid maps is unfair! So MacVector is designed to be as flexible as possible to allow you to make your maps look like YOU want then to look. In this theme was a recent change where appropriate features can be shown as residues when there is sufficient [...]

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New release of KeyServer K2

By Chris | Published: April 5, 2012

The latest version of KeyServer is now K2 7.0.0.5. Run the version check on this page to check which version of which part you are running and if you need to upgrade. Remember if you are upgrading from a version earlier than K2 v 7 you’ll need a new MacVector license. Contact Support to request [...]

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Assembler: Using the coverage map of the Reference Contig editor to analyze your assembly

By Chris | Published: March 12, 2012

There are two main steps to creating a reference assembly. Mapping your reads against your reference sequence and then analysing the alignment for variations. Knowing the depth of reads, or coverage, of an alignment is important for both of these stages. A low average depth of coverage means that you have less confidence in the [...]

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Choosing the default application to open a file type

By Chris | Published: March 1, 2012

Sometimes you’ll find that when you double click on a document (for example a protein sequence) that it opens in the wrong application. Generally this has resulted from recently installing a new application that has registered itself as the default application that you normally use to open that document. This will overwrite your default application. [...]

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Updating to Keyserver 7.0

By Chris | Published: February 28, 2012

KeyServer 7.0 was released a few months back. There is no need to upgrade your license server for MacVector. However, if you do want to upgrade then you must download the latest installer direct from Sassafras. This version (7.0.0.3) contains important bug fixes and is a later version than the KeyServer installer on the MacVector [...]

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Using old subsequence files with MacVector

By Chris | Published: February 20, 2012

Sometimes when a subsequence file, that has been created by an version of MacVector prior to MacVector 11, has been stored on a remote filesystem or has been emailed MacVector will refuse to open the file. Mac files are generally comprised of two pieces: A data fork and the resource fork. Prior to the release [...]

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MacVector 12.5 workshop at the University of Pennsylvania

By Chris | Published: February 8, 2012

If you are a user of MacVector or have any interest in sequence analysis for molecular biologists then you may be interested to know that there’s a workshop about MacVector at the University of Pennsylvania this Thursday open to faculty, students and researchers. When: Thursday February 9th 9:30 to 11:00 Where: Blockley Hall, Room 1311 [...]

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MacVector 12.5 workshop at Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Center

By Chris | Published: February 7, 2012

If you are a user of MacVector or have any interest in sequence analysis for molecular biologists then you may be interested to know that there’s a workshop about MacVector at MSKCC this Wednesday open to MSKCC faculty, students and researchers. When: Wednesday February 8 from 11:00 to 12:30 Where: Room RRL B20 “Dr Kevin [...]

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