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 […]

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Using MacVector’s Auto Annotate tool to annotate blank sequences.

By Chris | Published: January 10, 2018

  Have you ever been sent a plain unannotated sequence, or downloaded a sequence from Entrez and been disappointed as it doesn’t have the carefully curated graphical appearance of your favorite genes? Auto annotation solves both of these common problems. The basic idea is that you can scan the sequence against a folder containing a […]

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Turning on/off the SCAN FOR missing Features and ORFs

By Chris | Published: November 24, 2017

If you’re running MacVector 15.5 or later then you will have noticed extra features annotated to your sequences. These are from the Scan for ORFs tool (added in MacVector 15.5) and the Scan For Missing Features (added in MacVector 16) tools that automatically scan every DNA sequence window for open reading frames, missing annotations and […]

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Controlling The Automatic ORF Display in MacVector 15.5

By Chris | Published: November 24, 2017

MacVector 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 starts […]

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MacVector’s Scan For Missing Features tool makes beautiful plasmid maps easy!

By Chris | Published: November 15, 2017

Scan for.. Missing Features: Sequences are automatically scanned and missing features displayed. A simple right-click converts them to a permanent feature. Even blank sequences will be displayed fully annotated with common features. You can even add your own proprietary features. Tweet

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Annotating a gene in MacVector

By Chris | Published: August 18, 2017

Creating biologically accurate AND beautiful maps of your plasmids is easy in MacVector. All you need to do is select some sequence, then open the FEATURES EDITOR. Every annotation is fully compatible with the Genbank specification and Feature Table. Tweet

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Restriction enzyme analysis in MacVector and REBASE

By Chris | Published: October 7, 2016

Although there are two different ways to perform restriction enzyme analysis with MacVector, there are also additional places where restriction enzyme sites are shown. All these tools use the same set of restriction enzyme files to recognise enzymes. These files are updated regularly from the REBASE database. The restriction enzymes are divided into multiple files. […]

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Selecting sequence residues in the Map tab

By Chris | Published: June 13, 2016

The Map tab is very flexible and allows you to do almost all of the sequence manipulations you might need, without switching tabs. In addition to selecting segments of a sequence by clicking on Restriction Enzyme sites or Features, you can also directly select sequence even when the residues are not visible and represented by […]

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Creating cloning construction flowcharts in third party applications

By Chris | Published: June 6, 2016

We’ve previously discussed how every ligation is documented. You get a Frag annotation that contains the date, source sequence, enzymes used and any end modification that was done to that fragment during the ligation. However, we had regular requests to make it easier for users to document their constructs in other ways. For example, being […]

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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. […]

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