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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MacVector 16.0.10 and BLAST/Entrez issues

We recently became aware of a few issues with Entrez and BLAST. The most common issue is that in Entrez there are only two databases that you can search. The main cause is due to some changes the NCBI made to their service, that went live on the 1st of December, 2018. During the implementation […]

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Downloading hits from the MacVector BLAST Map results tab

MacVector’s BLAST Map results tab (added in MacVector 15.5) is a unique interface for examining the annotations around hits to a query sequence. Each pane in the display represents a High Scoring Segment Pair, as seen in the BLAST Aligned Sequence tab. At the lower left corner of each pane is a Download button – […]

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Use the BLAST Map to better identify blast hits

With the advent of cheap Next Generation Sequencing technologies, there has been an explosion of whole genome sequences deposited in BLAST databases. One consequence of this is that, particularly for sequences of bacterial origin, most of the significant hits are to entire genomes. The classic BLAST results show the sequence alignments, but give no indication […]

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Downloading hits from the MacVector 15.5 BLAST Map results tab

The MacVector 15.5 BLAST Map results tab is a unique interface for examining the annotations around hits to a query sequence. Each pane in the display represents a High Scoring Segment Pair, as seen in the BLAST Aligned Sequence tab. At the lower left corner of each pane is a Download button – when you […]

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Use the BLAST Map to better identify blast hits

With the advent of cheap Next Generation Sequencing technologies, there has been an explosion of whole genome sequences deposited in BLAST databases. One consequence of this is that, particularly for sequences of bacterial origin, most of the significant hits are to entire genomes. The classic BLAST results show the sequence alignments, but give no indication […]

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Using BLAST to automatically annotate a sequence

You can use the Database->Auto-Annotate Sequence function to quickly annotate a bare sequence using existing annotated sequences on your file system. However, this only works if your collection of sequences contains features representing all parts of the bare sequence. Luckily, if you have an unannotated region after running Auto-Annotate, you can use MacVector’s built-in BLAST […]

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Use the BLAST Map to better identify blast hits

With the advent of cheap Next Generation Sequencing technologies, there has been an explosion of whole genome sequences deposited in BLAST databases. One consequence of this is that, particularly for sequences of bacterial origin, most of the significant hits are to entire genomes. The classic BLAST results show the sequence alignments, but give no indication […]

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MacVector 15.5 is out: Graphical BLAST and automatic ORF display.

Our latest release, MacVector 15.5, introduces an entirely new way to view the results of BLAST searches, with an interactive graphical interface that let’s you easily visualize where your query maps to a hit. Unannotated Open Reading Frames are now automatically displayed whenever you open a DNA sequence. A number of changes to the Align […]

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How to retrieve BLAST hits from the Aligned Sequences result tab

After a BLAST search, you can retrieve matching sequences from the Description List results tab. What you may not know is that you can do a similar thing from the Aligned Sequences result tab. One advantage of this approach is that (as in the example above) sometimes there are multiple accession numbers for a hit. […]

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