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 […]

Posted in Releases | Also tagged , | Comments closed

Downloading BLAST Hits from the NCBI direct to your desktop

When you use MacVector to run a BLAST search, did you know that you can download any matching sequences directly from the BLAST Description List window? Simply select text on any part of the line(s) representing the sequence you want to download and choose Database | Retrieve To Desktop or Database | Retrieve To Disk […]

Posted in Techniques, Tips | Also tagged | Comments closed

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 […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , | Comments closed

101 things you (maybe) didn’t know about MacVector: #45 – Automatically annotating sequences using BLAST

The Database | Auto-annotate Sequence… tool is a great way to automatically annotate a bare DNA sequence. If you are unfamiliar with this, check out this previous tip. Auto-annotate is an incredibly simple (and fast!) way to annotate a bare sequence, but it does rely on you having a folder full of sequences containing all […]

Posted in 101 Tips | Also tagged | Comments closed

Keep Blast running on MacVector 12.7.5 and earlier versions.

If you are running MacVector 12.7.5 or earlier Blast will stop working for you from the end of this month. The fix for this is below. MacVector makes it easy to run a Blast search from your Desktop, and retrieve the hits directly back into MacVector. MacVector does this by submitting these Blast searches directly […]

Posted in General, Tips | Also tagged | Comments closed

101 things you (maybe) didn’t know about MacVector: #1 – Downloading BLAST Hits from the NCBI

When you use MacVector to run a BLAST search, did you know that you can download any matching sequences directly from the BLAST Description List window? Simply select text on any part of the line(s) representing the sequence you want to download; Then use the menu item Database | Retrieve to Disk to download any […]

Posted in 101 Tips | Tagged | Comments closed

Alignments in MacVector

Update 19 August 2013: We’ve added support for Muscle and T-Coffee to the MSA editor We get a lot of comments and questions from users on the various alignment functions in MacVector. They say there’s more than one way to skin a cat (not that I’ve done that – I have skinned a catfish, but […]

Posted in Algorithms, Tutorials | Also tagged , , | Comments closed