MacVector incorporates no less than THREE different de novo assemblers, phrap, velvet and SPAdes. While all are great assemblers, with each having their own specific advantages, none of them will generate a circular sequence from input reads. However, MacVector also includes a tool to help you with this. If you are assembling reads representing plasmid…
There are many genomes in the Genbank database that cannot be downloaded as single annotated sequences. These might be large multi-chromosome eukaryotic genomes, but, increasingly, partially sequenced bacterial chromosomes where the major contigs have been annotated using the NCBI annotation pipeline. Typically, when you encounter these, there are options to download annotated versions of these…
Many sequence formats contain multiple concatenated sequence entries. For example FASTA and Genbank are two formats capable of storing multiple individual sequences. By default MacVector will treat such sequences as alignments and open them in the Multiple Sequence Alignment editor. Most users who want to open such a file do want to see an alignment.…
MacVector has a wide array of different tools for working with protein and DNA sequences. MacVector has always been designed with the Mac’s simplicity in mind and getting started with simple tasks is quick. However, making the most of the many functions and getting familiar with MacVector’s wide range of tools does require more help…
MacVector 17’s brand new Restriction Enzyme Picker gives you an interactive way to quickly show what enzymes will digest your sequence. You can dynamically filter what sites are displayed. For example to show just 3’ overhang cutters or use other criteria. What’s more is that you can take a set of cut sites from one…
One new feature in our MacVector 17 release is the ability to automatically display primer binding sites in each DNA sequence that you open. Here’s an example of a couple of primers displayed on the popular pET 47b LIC cloning vector on each side of the LIC cloning site. The image shows how MacVector 17…
Macs are pretty good at choosing the right application to open a document. For example when you double click on a .nucl document then it will open in MacVector. However, sometimes this file association breaks. Applications should coexist peacefully on a Mac, but sometimes a misbehaving app will corrupt these file associations and you will…
If you are interested in making changes to a protein sequence, it is often useful to make a change to the coding DNA that will create a restriction enzyme site. Conversely, there may be times that you would like to create a site without affecting a protein coding region. You can accomplish this using the…
MacVector 17 has a greatly improved Assembly Projects manager, for better organization of multiple sequencing datasets, multiple references sequences and repeated jobs. Every time you run a new assembly job (either a reference assembly or de novo). A new job object is created in the Assembly Project window contains resulting contigs and any unaligned reads…
MacVector 17’s brand new Restriction Enzyme Picker is a new floating tool for selecting and filtering Restriction Enzymes to simplify the identification of useful enzyme cut sites. It initially presents you with a list of all available sites in a sequence. However, you can filter on many attributes, such as number of cuts, 5’ or…