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!

Zooming to the sequence level in the Map view

By Chris | Published: October 19, 2011

MacVector11MapSequenceLevel.png

ClickCloningStaggeredEditorEnds_MV12.png

When zoomed to the residue level it’s easy to check restriction enzyme ends.

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MacVector 12.5 new features

By Chris | Published: October 8, 2011

This is the first in a series of posts about and leading up to the release of MacVector 12.5.

MacVector 12.5 will be released shortly. As long as testing shows up no obstacles it will be soon entering the external beta stage. If you want to participate in the beta program please do email support.

This is a major release with a lot of new features. Many parts of MacVector have been substantially rewritten both to keep up with OS X as well as many dialogs that have been redesigned.

MacVector 12.5 will be fully Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) compatible (MacVector 12.0.6 is too). It will also be supported on OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). However, MacVector 12.5 will not be supported on OS X 10.4 (Tiger). If you are still using Tiger (from our last survey less than 1% of our users still use Tiger) MacVector 12.0.6 will still remain supported.

The main new features are for sequence alignments. We’ve added Bowtie to Assembler for further support of NGS data assemblies. Also extra alignment algorithms,Muscle and T-coffee, have been added to the Multiple Sequence Alignment analysis interface, complementing the existing ClustalW algorithm. We’ve wanted both of these for a while now and judging from the results of last year’s survey so have many users.

Watch the blog for posts detailing these and other new features over the next few weeks,


..and remember if you purchase an upgrade or a new license before the release of MacVector 12.5 you will get a 10% discount and a free upgrade to MacVector 12.5 when it is released. Contact Sales@macvector.com and quote “MV12510″ for the discount.

MV125 ReferenceContigEDITOR

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Problems with DMG appearing not to mount.

By Chris | Published: October 8, 2011

Sometimes when you download the MacVector disk image and try to mount it nothing appears to happen.

Generally this is because although it has been mounted a Finder window has not popped up. It also affects those of us with messy desktop (not me of course!). If you have many files then you might miss the MacVector CD icon.

The default behaviour for when you mount a disc image file (DMG) is to show a Finder window with that mounted DMG. However, this is configurable and not from an obvious place. You need to launch Disk Utility and go to PREFERENCES. Ensure it’s selected to “AUTOMATICALLY OPEN ……..”.

Do that and remount your DMG and it will appear.

DISKUTILITY Prefs

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Steve Jobs RIP

By Chris | Published: October 6, 2011

Steve Jobs RIP

612px Steve Jobs Headshot 2010 CROP

Credit: Matthew Yohe

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MacVector 12.0.6

By Chris | Published: September 28, 2011

MacVector 12.0.6 was released a few days ago. This has a few small but significant bug fixes. If you are running MacVector 12 it’s a recommended upgrade.

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MacVector 10.6 and earlier and Lion

By Chris | Published: September 19, 2011

If you have upgraded to Lion and you’re running MacVector 10 to 10.6 (earlier versions will not run) then anytime MacVector displays an error message it will crash. MacVector 10.6 was developed before even Snow Leopard was released and is quite long in the tooth now. Why not take this opportunity to upgrade to MacVector 12? As well as a 25% discount (before the end of September) there’s a load of new features that will make you more productive, including some great features for cloning. Upgrading now will also include a free update to MacVector 12.5 which will be out in a month or so.

MultiwayGatewayEndLigationDialogue

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Useful help resources for learning MacVector

By Chris | Published: September 9, 2011

MacVector is designed to be easy to use. However, there’s a great amount of functionality in there. So if you are new to using MacVector or you’ve recently upgraded from an older version then you might be interested to know that we have some downloadable resources to help you.

The first one, which we recommend all new users to read, is the short “Getting Started with MacVector 11″ guide. This document is geared for those who already use MacVector and introduces you to the new functions and features from MacVector 9 onwards. It is still useful if you are not very familiar with any version of MacVector.

Down toward the bottom of the page you will also find some tutorials on specific tasks. For example here’s a great one on Auto Annotation.

We also have some short screencasts available on this page of our website:

You can also visit the MacVector forums where we welcome discussion. There’s some useful tips on there, and news of any updates we release:

You can also subscribe to our RSS feed to be kept updated on all MacVector news or follow us on Twitter.

Finally there’s a full PDF copy of our manual

 

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Are you teaching a Molecular Biology Course this year?

By Rosemary | Published: August 30, 2011

Many MacVector users don’t realize that we offer FREE licenses for teaching purposes. If you or your lab owns a license of MacVector 12 with a current maintenance contract, you are eligible. If you are teaching a course this year and are in the process of preparing your course content, consider using MacVector as a teaching tool. All we need is the course name and number, start and stop date of the course, and the number of seats needed. If you are interested in this, but your license is older, you can upgrade it at a fraction of the cost of a new license. You are then eligible for teaching licenses. Contact sales@macvector.com if you are interested.

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MacVector 12.0.5 is out

By Chris | Published: August 17, 2011

MacVector 12.0.5 is a cumulative patch release that fixes a few bugs in MacVector 12.0.4 and includes all the bug fixes since 12.0 was released. If you have a current maintenance contract with MacVector (as of Dec 1st 2010), you can download the updater for MacVector 12.0.5.

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Updated Gateway Restriction Enzyme file

By Chris | Published: August 15, 2011

Here’s an updated restriction enzyme file for Gateway cloning with MacVector.

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