Author: Chris

  • MacVector and future releases of macOS

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    The next OS release for the Mac will arrive later this year. MacOS Mojave is a significant OS upgrade and includes a lot of new features, especially when compared with the differences between OS X El Capitan, macOS Sierra and macOS High Sierra. Our developers have been hard at work ensuring that when macOS Mojave…

  • RNASeq Expression Analysis with MacVector and Assembler

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    Chris
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    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…

  • How to split large fastq files for more manageable assemblies

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    We’ve previously discussed how important it can be to make sure you are using the appropriate number of fastq reads from an NGS experiment to ensure you obtain the results you are looking for. Using too many reads can confuse algorithms with the massive coverage increasing mis-assemblies due to background errors in the reads. In…

  • Balancing Velvet KMER and coverage

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    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…

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

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    Chris
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    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…

  • Getting Started with MacVector

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    Any molecular biologist should be able to start getting useful results within an hour of starting to use MacVector by just exploring the toolbar and menus. Everything is logically named to be obvious. However, there’s still a lot of functionality that a user will never know exists. That is unless you read the manual or…

  • The MacVector Team are at ASM Microbe 2018 in Atlanta this week.

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    We’re at ASM Microbe 2018 in Atlanta from Friday until Sunday (8–10th June). The exhibit hall hours are again different from the last two years. Friday, June 8th – 10:30 AM – 5:00 PM Sat. June 9th – 10:30 AM – 5:00 PM Sunday, June 10th – 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM We’re on booth…

  • Workflows on designing, testing and storing primers in MacVector

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    MacVector is the best PCR Primer design application on macOS. It has many innovative primer tools to make designing, analyzing and cataloging your primers or oligos easy. Here are a few typical workflows. Designing primers Amplifying a gene You can design a set of primers to amplify a gene in as little as three mouse…

  • MacVector 16 and macOS High Sierra 10.13.4.

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    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…

  • Assemble bacterial genomes in minutes on your Mac laptop

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    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…