What can MacVector do for my lab?

By Chris | Published: April 25, 2019

Here’s what MacVector can do for your lab. Comparing sequences Whatever type of alignment your sequence needs, there’s a tool in MacVector. CRISPR Indel Analysis: Identify insertions and deletions following CRISPR editing of a target. Compare Genomes: Compares two related annotated genomes to identify identical, similar and weakly similar features. Sequence assembly of NGS data […]

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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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Balancing Velvet KMER and coverage

By Chris | Published: June 12, 2018

The Velvet assembly algorithm in MacVector is blazingly fast and generates excellent assemblies. However, you do have to be careful when assembling NGS data to be sure that the parameters you submit are appropriate for the data you are assembling in order to get optimal results. By far the most important parameter is the KMER […]

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Use a right-click in the Editor tab to see if your contig can be circularized

By Chris | Published: June 6, 2018

MacVector 16 incorporates no less than THREE different de novo assemblers, phrap, velvet and SPAdes. While all are great assemblers, with each having their own specific advantages, none of them will generate a circular sequence from input reads. However, MacVector 16 also includes a new feature to help you with this. If you are assembling […]

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Assemble bacterial genomes in minutes on your Mac laptop

By Chris | Published: April 19, 2018

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 […]

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Simple Assembly of Sanger Sequencing Files with MacVector Assembler

By Chris | Published: April 19, 2018

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 […]

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An overview of assembling sequencing data with MacVector’s Assembler plugin

By Chris | Published: April 19, 2018

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 […]

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Import Multi-Sequence Genbank Files into an Assembly Project for easy access to Features

By Chris | Published: April 19, 2018

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 […]

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RNASeq Expression Analysis with NGS data

By Chris | Published: December 20, 2017

If you have the Assembler module, MacVector can align millions of NGS reads from RNASeq experiments against large genomes and generate a coverage table displaying the relative expression levels of every gene in a genome. The key to this functionality is that you must have a reference genome with genes annotated as CDS or gene […]

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Use a right-click in the Contig Editor tab to see if your contig can be circularized

By Chris | Published: November 29, 2017

MacVector 16 incorporates no less than THREE different de novo assemblers, phrap, velvet and SPAdes. While all are great assemblers, with each having their own specific advantages, none of them will generate a circular sequence from input reads. However, MacVector 16 also includes a new feature to help you with this. If you are assembling […]

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