Simple Assembly of Sanger Sequencing Files with MacVector Assembler

With MacVector Assembler, assembling ABI Sanger Sequencing files is simple, fast and accurate. MacVector uses the popular phred/phrap/cross_match set of tools from the University of Washington. To improve accuracy, and to help resolve repeats, these tools use “quality scores” (popularly known as “phred scores”), giving them an advantage over many other methods. To assemble two or more ABI files, follow these steps.

  • Use File | New | Assembly Project to create a new project
  • Click on the Add Seqs toolbar button and select all of your ABI (or SCF) chromatogram files to import
  • Click on the phred toolbar button – this re-calls the traces and generates quality scores (no need to select any items in the project, though you can to run phred on specific files)
  • Click on the phrap toolbar button and accept the defaults
  • After phrap has run, you will be presented with one or more contigs (assuming your ABI reads actually overlap). If you double-click on one of those, a contig editor will open letting you view and edit the actual alignments.

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    Simple DNA sequence assembly on a Mac with MacVector with Assembler.

    MacVector has a software plugin called Assembler that integrates directly into the DNA sequence analysis toolkit and provides DNA sequence assembly functionality. Dealing with sequencing reads has never been easier.

    MacVector includes no less than five different assemblers just a few mouse clicks away from your sequencing reads. Phrap assembles Sanger sequencing reads or existing contigs, while there are three separate NGS de novo assemblers – Velvet for short read datasets, Flye for Nanopore and PacBio long reads and SPAdes for mixed assemblies. For reference assembly Bowtie2 can map millions of sequencing reads against genomic reference sequences and is ideal for RNASeq gene expression analysis data too.

    Assembler is tightly integrated into MacVector. It’s easy to bring sequencing reads into MacVector, and it’s just as easy to directly design primers for a contig, run BLAST searches on a contig, and much more, right from your desktop!

    Not sure if you have Assembler? Choose MacVector | About MacVector. If the screen that appears says “MacVector with Assembler, Pro Edition” then you have it. If not, you can sign up for a fully functional 21 day trial version.

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