Author: Kevin
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101 things you (maybe) didn’t know about MacVector: #4 – FREE Teaching Licenses
As many US Universities prepare for the upcoming fall semester, now is a good time to remind you that we do offer complimentary teaching licenses for accredited Institutions in all countries. If you are running a practical course involving DNA or Protein analysis for the fall semester (or the autumn term!), you might consider installing…
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101 things you (maybe) didn’t know about MacVector: #3 – The Importance of Topology
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…
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101 things you (maybe) didn’t know about MacVector: #2 – Option-click to open the Default Symbol editor
If you download sequences from BLAST or Entrez, or import GenBank or EMBL files with lots of features, you may wish that the features (genes, CDS, promoters etc) showed up differently in the Map tab, or maybe your favorite features don’t show up at all unless you turn them on using the Graphics Palette. Its…
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101 things you (maybe) didn’t know about MacVector: #1 – Downloading BLAST Hits from the NCBI
When you use MacVector to run a BLAST search, did you know that you can download any matching sequences directly from the BLAST Description List window? Simply select text on any part of the line(s) representing the sequence you want to download; Then use the menu item Database | Retrieve to Disk to download any…
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Gateway and TOPO Cloning with MacVector
Here at MacVector we always try to listen to our end users when deciding what functionality to add to new versions. The more users that request a new feature, the more likely it is to get to the top of the list. One item that recently reached the top of our list was support for…
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Auto Annotation in MacVector 11
Have you ever got that plasmid back from the sequencing facility as a bare sequence with no annotations? Or downloaded that vector from from the vendors site to find its only available in a fasta format with no features? Or maybe your collaborators send you poorly annotated sequences. Maybe your lab-mate uses MacVector but insists…
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Alignments in MacVector
Update 19 August 2013: We’ve added support for Muscle and T-Coffee to the MSA editor We get a lot of comments and questions from users on the various alignment functions in MacVector. They say there’s more than one way to skin a cat (not that I’ve done that – I have skinned a catfish, but…
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MacVector at the ASM
If you are attending the American Society for Microbiology meeting in Philadephia, be sure to stop by the MacVector booth ( 304) and say hello. We are giving away some cool mouse pads with a summary of the DNA and Protein IUPAC codes and the Universal Genetic Code printed on them for quick reference.
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Patch Releases
A trail of ants came marching though my kitchen last week. I found the hole they came in and plugged it up. There, that’s sorted them. Two days later they were back, this time through a different hole. Bugs – I hate them. Just like software. There are probably as many different approaches to software…