Author Archives: Chris

IMPORTANT SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT Entrez and BLAST services will stop working in November for MacVector 15.0.3 and earlier.

UPDATE – November 8, 2016 – Although the official switch off date is not until Wednesday the 9th, Entrez and BLAST are NOT currently working from MacVector 15.0.3 and earlier. We suspect this change is now permanent. UPDATE – November 7, 2016 – We have just been notified by the NCBI that they will be […]

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Highlighting sequence using color and lower case in the Editor tab

You can very quickly annotate a region of interest in your sequence in the Editor tab. For example, showing introns in lower case or highlighting CDS features with a colored background. Using the TRANSFORMATIONS menu To enter sequences as mixed case. Enable Edit | Transformations | Enable Mixed Case Entry Type your sequence using SHIFT […]

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Estimating insert length quickly for a read pair

[Edit December 20, 2017 – As of MacVector 15.5 you can simply right click a READ and select “SEE MATCHING READS” to view the pair of reads. The total sequence length is selected. ] Insert length is the length of the sequence in between a pair of reads. Sequencers are supplied DNA samples in fragments of […]

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Restriction enzyme analysis in MacVector and REBASE

Although there are two different ways to perform restriction enzyme analysis with MacVector, there are also additional places where restriction enzyme sites are shown. All these tools use the same set of restriction enzyme files to recognise enzymes. These files are updated regularly from the REBASE database. The restriction enzymes are divided into multiple files. […]

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Drag and drop to quickly annotate ORFs

You can use the Analyze | Open Reading Frames function to very quickly find ORFs on a sequence. Did you know that you can very quickly turn those results into permanent CDS features on your sequence? After running the Open Reading Frames analysis, simply drag and drop the ORF objects you are interested in from […]

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Download the latest published version of your favorite sequence with its accession number

It’s very quick to download the latest version of a sequence if you know its accession number. When you start working with a new sequence, it’s the best place to start. Go to DATABASE > ENTREZ Enter the accession number of your favorite sequence Click SEARCH Double click on the result to open up your […]

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How to change the default appearance of RE sites

MacVector is extremely customizable. If you don’t like the defaults we supply, its very easy to change them. Lets look at restriction enzyme sites. By default we show unique sites in small red letters and sites that cut more than once in small blue letters. But suppose you want something bigger, bolder and, well, more […]

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NIH Research Festival September 14-16, 2016

We’re at the NIH Research Festival this week. Please drop by our booth on Thursday or Friday, when the big, white exhibitors tent is open. We’re on booth #562. We’ll be able to show you our latest release, MacVector 15 and we’ll have some goodies too!

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Working with digested fragments in the Cloning Clipboard

The Cloning Clipboard is an easy, and flexible, way to design and document your cloning strategies. Here’s two tips on manipulating a single fragment. – If you drag a fragment from the Cloning Clipboard to a vector, then you’ll get the ligation dialog. However, if you have already selected a pair of enzyme sites, then […]

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How to use Codon Preference plots

When you are looking for open reading frames in newly sequenced regions, it’s not always the longest ORFs that are protein-encoding. Lets look at an example from one of the sequences included with MacVector: /Applications/MacVector/Sample Files/Gal Cosmid.nucl. This is from Streptomyces coelicolor, a filamentous bacteria with a 73% G+C content. The high G+C% means that […]

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