MacVectorTip: Designing Primers for Gibson Assembly

You can use MacVector to design primers for multi-fragment Gibson Assembly, and also generate the predicted recombinant DNA molecule resulting from the assembly. All you have to do to get started is choose the File->New->Gibson/Ligase-independent Assembly… menu item. From there, you can choose the type of assembly (it doesn’t have to be the usual 5’ […]

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MacVectorTip: Sign up for an NCBI API key to speed up BLAST results

MacVector has a very cool BLAST Map results tab that displays the annotations surrounding any hits from the selected database. Particularly if you are working with prokaryotic sequences, where most BLAST hits these days are to genome sequences. This can really help you see the context of your hits, and let you download just the […]

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MacVectorTip: displaying CRISPR PAM Sites on a sequence

CRISPR-Cas9 genetic editing mechanisms require a short (typically 20nt) RNA sequence complementary to a target site next to a Protospacer Adjacent Motif (PAM) sequence. The most commonly used Cas9 nuclease (SpCas9) from Streptococcus pyogenes recognizes the PAM sequence NGG. One new function introduced a few years ago will search for PAM sequences in your sequence. […]

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MacVectorTip: visualizing shared domains in a protein alignment

MacVector has a domain-outlining facility for multiple sequence alignments, letting you easily visualize the relationships between features in aligned protein sequences. MacVector’s new multiple alignment file format retains the features/annotations from the sequences that are used to create the alignment. The colors of features from the individual sequence documents are used to outline the domains […]

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