Apple have just released macOS® High Sierra 10.13.4. This may appear to be just an incremental update to macOS High Sierra. However, under the hood there are some major changes, not least is a new warning dialog if you are running an older application on macOS High Sierra. With the release of macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 […]
MacVector with Assembler contains some remarkably powerful algorithms for assembling Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data. Not so long ago, you needed a powerful Linux server with lots of memory for de novo assembly of whole genomes. But with advances in the efficiency of algorithms and improvements in hardware, it is now possible to assemble quite […]
With MacVector Assembler, assembling ABI Sanger Sequencing files is simple, fast and accurate. MacVector uses the popular phred/phrap/cross_match set of tools from the University of Washington. To improve accuracy, and to help resolve repeats, these tools use “quality scores” (popularly known as “phred scores”), giving them an advantage over many other methods. To assemble two […]
To assemble various types of sequencing reads, follow these steps. Choose File | New | Assembly Project to create a new empty project file. Then follow one of the following: To create a de novo assembly from Sanger reads Click on the Add Reads tool bar button, then select the sequence files you wish to […]
There are short video tips on using MacVector on our blog and our YouTube channel. Each one is less than 2 minutes and generally shorter than that! There will be a new screencast every few weeks, so please subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss any! The latest screencasts include quickly annotating a […]
Sequences, or regions of sequences, can be linked to external databases. For example an entire sequence entry or for when annotation tools are used to annotate proteins with domain or motif information (for example InterProScan). Very useful for when you want to view more detailed or updated information. Within the Genbank specification, which MacVector extensively uses, […]
Most primary MacVector windows (Nucleic Acid Sequence, Protein Sequence, Multiple Sequence Alignment, Align To Reference, Contig Assembly etc.) have a Replica toolbar button. If you click that button, a second window will open, potentially set to a different tab. The key to this functionality is that the two windows are linked – any selections you […]
MacVector’s Subsequence tool is a very flexible search function that can be used for a variety of tasks. MacVector itself has a built-in variant of the function for maintaining and search primer databases (Analyze | Primer Database Search…). Each entry in the file MacVector uses as a source of subsequence data can have up to […]
There are many genomes in the Genbank database that cannot be downloaded as single annotated sequences. These might be large multi-chromosome eukaryotic genomes, but, increasingly, partially sequenced bacterial chromosomes where the major contigs have been annotated using the NCBI annotation pipeline. Typically, when you encounter these, there are options to download annotated versions of these […]
Many sequence formats contain multiple concatenated sequence entries. For example FASTA and Genbank are two formats capable of storing multiple individual sequences. By default MacVector will treat such sequences as alignments and open them in the Multiple Sequence Alignment editor. Most users who want to open such a file do want to see an alignment. […]