The Map tab of MacVector is a powerful way to visualise and interact with your sequences. All analysis tools will work directly in the Map tab. You can design primers, ligate and digest fragments from the Cloning Clipboard, visualise translated CDS regions and much more. In fact one of the only tasks, you will need […]
Although we think that the default appearance of sequence maps in MacVector is very pretty, sometimes the defaults are not to everybody’s taste! If you think this way, then changing how maps look is very easy. Rather than edit the appearance of all of your sequences it is far better to modify the default symbol […]
With MacVector 14.0 we introduced two minor changes that have just not pleased a lot of users. We spend a lot of time discussing all improvements in every release and we did think that these two changes improved MacVector. But a lot of users have complained about both of them. So it looks like we […]
If you download eukaryotic genomes from GenBank, you will find that many coding (i.e. CDS) features are segmented and consist of multiple individual segments joined together into a single long feature. You can see an example of this with the human cystic fibrosis transmembrane regulator gene – you find a copy of this in the […]
There’s a few different ways to import annotation from the ENSEMBL database browser, as well as other databases. Using Genbank The easiest way to export from ENSEMBL and keep all annotation is to use the Genbank format. The default format will be FASTA which has no annotation. With Genbank all the annotation is stored in […]
Note: while preparing this blog post we discovered a bug in MacVector 12.7.4 that prevents submission using the exact steps shown here. Be sure you are using MacVector 12.7.5 or later which has the bug fixed. If you are using an earlier version, send an e-mail to support@macvector.com and we’ll send you the details of […]
Following on from my recent posts on manual and semi-manual creation of features, the next approach I want to discuss is a fully automated function for creating features. How often do you get sent plain sequences that have no features annotated, even though you know your favorite gene is on there, along with a few […]
In my last post I described how you can quickly create and annotate features onto a DNA sequence, although the post was primarily aimed at users who are new to MacVector. In this post I’ll take a look at how you can quickly and easily annotate a DNA sequence with features based on the results […]
This is a tip primarily aimed at new users of MacVector, but may be of interest to anyone who wants better understand the way MacVector handles features. MacVector can create wonderfully detailed graphical maps of a sequence, showing all the points of interest, restriction sites, open reading frames etc. However, each item to be displayed […]
While most features you might encounter in DNA files have a simple start and stop location on the sequence, some features are segmented. For example, the coding sequence of a protein encoding reading frame containing introns is represented by a segmented CDS feature on the genomic DNA. MacVector has always understood that the individual segments […]