Category Archives: Tips

HOW DO I video guides to common molecular biology workflows

By Chris | Published: February 27, 2019

MacVector has a wide array of different tools for working with protein and DNA sequences. MacVector has always been designed with the Mac’s simplicity in mind and getting started with simple tasks is quick. However, making the most of the many functions and getting familiar with MacVector’s wide range of tools does require more help […]

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Show or hide the RE Picker and the Graphics Palette from the toolbar

By Chris | Published: February 8, 2019

MacVector 17’s brand new Restriction Enzyme Picker gives you an interactive way to quickly show what enzymes will digest your sequence. You can dynamically filter what sites are displayed. For example to show just 3’ overhang cutters or use other criteria. What’s more is that you can take a set of cut sites from one […]

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Scan For… Missing Primers: Automatic Primer Binding Site Display in MacVector 17.0

By Chris | Published: February 5, 2019

One new feature in our upcoming MacVector 17 release is the ability to automatically display primer binding sites in each DNA sequence that you open. Here’s an example of a couple of primers displayed on the popular pET 47b LIC cloning vector on each side of the LIC cloning site. The image shows how MacVector […]

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Restoring file associations when MacVector no longer opens your sequence documents.

By Chris | Published: January 30, 2019

Macs are pretty good at choosing the right application to open a document. For example when you double click on a .nucl document then it will open in MacVector. However, sometimes this file association breaks. Applications should coexist peacefully on a Mac, but sometimes a misbehaving app will corrupt these file associations and you will […]

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How to find one-out Restriction Sites that will change a protein coding sequence

By Chris | Published: January 21, 2019

If you are interested in making changes to a protein sequence, it is often useful to make a change to the coding DNA that will create a restriction enzyme site. Conversely, there may be times that you would like to create a site without affecting a protein coding region. You can accomplish this using the […]

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Comparing coverage depth across multiple reference assemblies with MacVector 17

By Chris | Published: December 17, 2018

MacVector 17 has a greatly improved Assembly Projects manager, for better organization of multiple sequencing datasets, multiple references sequences and repeated jobs. Every time you run a new assembly job (either a reference assembly or de novo). A new job object is created in the Assembly Project window contains resulting contigs and any unaligned reads […]

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Making restriction enzyme cloning easier with MacVector 17’s Restriction Enzyme Picker.

By Chris | Published: December 6, 2018

MacVector 17’s brand new Restriction Enzyme Picker is a new floating tool for selecting and filtering Restriction Enzymes to simplify the identification of useful enzyme cut sites. It initially presents you with a list of all available sites in a sequence. However, you can filter on many attributes, such as number of cuts, 5’ or […]

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Use Database | Auto-Annotate Sequence to annotate prokaryotic genomes

By Chris | Published: November 8, 2018

The continuing advances in Next Generation Sequencing have made it relatively low cost to sequence prokaryotic genomes. Many scientists are embarking on large projects to sequence multiple related genomes. These might be clinical isolates of the same species exhibiting different pathogenetic properties, environmental isolates from different sites, or a study over time of the changes […]

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Automatically displaying open reading frames with MacVector’s Scan For Open Reading Frames tool

By Chris | Published: September 27, 2018

As well as Scan for.. Missing Features that shows annotation on your sequences, you may have noticed extra CDS features annotated to your sequences. These are from the Scan for.. Open Reading Frames tool that automatically scans every DNA sequence window for open reading frames and displays the results in the Map tab. It’s very useful, […]

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Pasting tabular data from MacVector into Microsoft Excel

By Chris | Published: September 27, 2018

There are a number of MacVector analyses that generate tabular text output. Examples include the Protein Analysis Toolbox List output, the Raw Data tab of the ABI chromatogram document window, the Matrix tab of the multiple sequence alignment document windows and the Coverage tab of the Bowtie contig editor. Each of these is actually composed […]

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