Category Archives: Techniques

Howtos, tips and descriptions of various techniques for using MacVector.

Label customisation using metatags in the Map View

MacVector has always given the user great control in being able to customise the map’s appearance. By default the label will show the full text description of a feature and all its qualifiers (see the first metatag in the list below). However, the label can contain whatever text you want it to display. Obviously you […]

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Aligning primers against a template sequence

A common request, especially in our recent survey, is to align existing primer sequences against a template sequence. There are many ways to do this in MacVector, depending on what your requirements are Using the Find dialog For quickly finding a single primer in a sequence the Find dialog is the first point of call. […]

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Clustering an alignment

Sometimes it is useful to sort, or cluster, an alignment according to the similarity/identity of its sequences. With such a sorted alignment you are able to more easily visualise closely related sequences as they will be together in an alignment with more distantly related sequences being much further apart. If you want to quickly cluster […]

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Creating your own subsequence library of primers

As mentioned in a recent post MacVector has a powerful feature called Subsequence searches. This function allows you to keep a library of sequence pattern matches, using a powerful nomenclature with up to three parts, and quickly scan protein and nucleic acid sequences with this library. .Although MacVector ships with a number of collections of […]

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Jaspar, MacVector & Subsequence searches

MacVector allows you to find motifs, primers, transcription factor binding sites, or any significant region with a consensus sequence, in your sequence using a powerful feature called subsequence searches. This function allows you to keep a library of sequence patterns of either nucleic acid or proteins. You can use subsequences with complex patterns for the search […]

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Displaying translations alongside your DNA sequence

There’s a few ways to display an amino acid translation in the same window as your DNA or RNA sequence. (1) You can show either three or six frame translations directly in the editor. To do so simply press and hold down the STRANDS toolbar button. You’ll see the following menu and be able to […]

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Graphics In MacVector: Exporting publication quality graphics.

This article is the first in a series of “howtos” resulting from the 2010 survey results. It may not be at the cutting edge of sequence analysis but sooner or later most users of such apps are going to have to produce a graphic of their work, whether that is a plasmid map, a tree, […]

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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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Designing and testing primers in MacVector – part 2

In the first article in this series we took an overview of all the primer design tools in MacVector. In this second look at primer design in MacVector I’m going to look in more detail at our latest tool – Design Primers (Primer3). Primer3 is a powerful, highly configurable command line tool for designing primers. […]

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An overview of Sequence Assembly in MacVector

MacVector has had sequence assembly functionality for a long time. Many moons ago MacVector came with a OS9 only tool called AssemblyLIGN. Although a useful tool it was fairly limited and needed a complete replacement, so about five years ago Assembler was released, which is a much more modern tool for sequence assembly. In addition […]

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