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 […]

Posted in Tips | Also tagged , , | Comments closed

Use the Replica Button For Synchronized Views

By Chris | Published: April 19, 2018

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 […]

Posted in Tips | Also tagged , , , | Comments closed

Controlling Automatic ORF Display

By Chris | Published: August 18, 2017

MacVector 15.5 automatically scans every DNA sequence window for open reading frames and displays the results in the Map tab. The setting for this are controlled by the MacVector | Preferences | DNA Map pane, along with the automatic Show restriction sites settings. The Minimum Number of Codons setting is fairly obvious. 5’ ends are […]

Posted in Tips | Also tagged , , | Comments closed

How to change the default appearance of RE sites

By Chris | Published: September 14, 2016

MacVector is extremely customizable. If you don’t like the defaults we supply, its very easy to change them. Lets look at restriction enzyme sites. By default we show unique sites in small red letters and sites that cut more than once in small blue letters. But suppose you want something bigger, bolder and, well, more […]

Posted in Tips | Also tagged , , | Comments closed

How to increase the number of graphics levels to stop features overlapping.

By Chris | Published: July 4, 2016

MacVector tries to optimize the Map graphics layout using a trade-off between performance and minimizing unnecessary white space. Sometimes the default settings we have chosen are not ideal, particularly if you are looking at the Map tab of an Align To Reference window where you have a large number of reads overlapping the same region. […]

Posted in Tips | Also tagged | Comments closed

Designing and documenting cloning strategies

By Chris | Published: May 23, 2016

Designing cloning strategies is easy with the Cloning Clipboard. You can perform quite complex ligations by simply dragging compatible ends together. However, when you open this construct a year later, you don’t want to have to look back in your lab book to know how you generated it. Neither do you need to! MacVector fully […]

Posted in Tips, Tutorials | Also tagged , , | Comments closed

Editing the appearance of your sequence maps

By Chris | Published: April 18, 2016

Although we think that the default appearance of sequence maps in MacVector is very pretty, sometimes the defaults are not to everybody’s taste! If you think this way, then changing how maps look is very easy. As usual with MacVector, there are many ways to quickly edit the appearance of a feature or multiple features. […]

Posted in Tips | Also tagged , , | Comments closed

The Importance of Topology

By Chris | Published: April 18, 2016

MacVector understands the difference between circular DNA molecules and linear DNA molecules. Not just from the standpoint of how the molecule is displayed on the screen, but also in regard to how the analysis algorithms handle the junction at the ends of the circle. The Topology button controls the underlying linear versus circular state of […]

Posted in Tips | Also tagged , | Comments closed

How to increase the number of graphics levels to stop features overlapping.

By Chris | Published: April 11, 2016

MacVector tries to optimize the Map graphics layout using a trade-off between performance and minimizing unnecessary white space. Sometimes the default settings we have chosen are not ideal, particularly if you are looking at the Map tab of an Align To Reference window where you have a large number of reads overlapping the same region. […]

Posted in Tips | Also tagged , , | Comments closed

The simplest way to export high quality graphics from the Map tab

By Chris | Published: April 4, 2016

So you’ve finally go the graphics for that new construct looking absolutely fabulous in MacVector and you want to get it into an image editing program (e.g. Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop or even PowerPoint) ready for that critical presentation. How best to do it? The easiest way, by far, is to simply choose Edit->Copy to copy […]

Posted in Tips | Also tagged | Comments closed