One of the more challenging aspects of dealing with large eukaryotic genomes is that most are incomplete and have many gaps. Often the genomes are available as a collection of hundreds or thousands of separate contigs, with associated annotations. This makes working with them awkward. However, increasingly, entire annotated chromosomes can be downloaded with the…
MacVector’s History tab shows the edit history of your DNA sequences. Some of MacVector’s editing tools will annotate every modification to your sequence. For example with the Cloning Clipboard, all cloning actions (such as ligating a digested fragment into a vector) create a /FRAG feature that records the source of the ligated fragment, the restriction enzymes used to digest it (and…
Very occasionally, you may find MacVector behaving unusually. Perhaps windows are not activating correctly, or functions you have used without issue for many years have suddenly started crashing, taking an excessive amount of time to run or generating nonsensical results. When such issues are reported to MacVector Support, we always try to perform an in-depth…
The Quicktest Primer interface is highly interactive and the display shows restriction enzymes and the amino acids sequences of CDS features in the region of interest. Here’s a ~25nt primer aligned against a parental sequence. Restriction enzyme recognition sites are shown in black text. “One-out” sites (e.g. a 5 out of 6 match) are shown with an…
In September of 2024, we started including Assembler with all new, upgraded and renewed licenses of MacVector. Assembler is fully integrated within MacVector and is enabled by the license activation code. However, it may be that your lab or institution has a new Assembler activation code after a renewal, but you are still using an…
If you are having difficulties viewing the name of your sequence in the title bar of a window, it may be because you have “Full Titles” turned on. So if your window title looks like this; Then open MacVector’s Windows menu and deselect Show Full Titles. …and you now just see the name of the…
In the previous post we discussed the various ways in which you can analyze Oxford Nanopore’s long read data. For de novo assembly we recommend using Flye, which can also be used with PacBio data. Here are some tips to get the most out of Flye. IMPORTANT: MacVector simply wrappers around the Flye executable algorithm which depends on…
Here’s a few tips regarding analyzing long read data from the Oxford Nanopore Technology MinION and GridION machines. First, you should always first create a File | New | Assembly Project and then (typically) click on the Add Reads toolbar button and select the appropriate fastq formatted data files. These are often supplied in compressed…
MacVector 18.8 is out and it’s packed with new tools! MacVector 18.8 has tools to help you identify and annotate unknown, unannotated or partially annotated sequences. Ideal for identifying contigs from a de novo assembly. One of these new tools is AutoAnnotate (via BLAST) Batch BLAST is a game-changing feature that revolutionises the way you identify unknown sequences. With…
For those who celebrate the MacVector team wish you a very merry Christmas. We hope you are able to turn off that sequencer, put away your pipette and have a relaxing time with your loved ones. Here’s to a better year for science in 2026!
