Category: Techniques
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Reference assembly with MacVector and Assembler
MacVector has a plugin module called Assembler that integrates directly into the main package and provides sequence assembly functionality. Assembler was designed from the ground up to be easy to use and allow users to easily manage the large amount of data that sequencing generates nowadays. The Assembler interface is built around the Assembly Project…
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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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Confirming a small sequencing project against a reference sequence
Align to reference is a perfect tool for mapping small sequencing projects against a reference sequence. It’s perfect for accurately and quickly: – Confirming the sequence of a cloned fragment – Sequencing across the ends of a cloned fragment to confirm the junction sequence – Screening clones from a site-specific mutagenesis experiment to identify successful…
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Simple but accurate restriction enzyme based clone construction using Copy and Paste
The quickest and simplest way to create restriction enzyme generated constructs in MacVector is to use Edit | Copy and Edit | Paste. The strategy to use is identical to copying a paragraph from one Microsoft Word document to insert into a second document. i.e. Select the restriction enzymes flanking the source fragment in either…
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Customizing BLAST alignment results to make mismatches more noticeable
When you run a Blast search, as well as a list of hits, you will get a list of alignments between your query sequence and each hit. As with most other text alignments in MacVector, identical matches are by default represented by a vertical line (a score greater than 1) and mismatches (whether similar or…
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How to save contig consensus sequences from assembly projects
The MacVector Assembler module lets you create projects, populate them with Sanger Sequencing or NGS data files (or any sequences in a format that MacVector can read) and then assemble them using the popular phrap and/or Velvet assemblers. Typically, the result will be a collection of contigs that you might want to use in additional…
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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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Functional domain analysis of protein sequences using InterProScan
There’s a new tool in MacVector 15 that allows you to do functional domain analysis on your protein sequence using the InterProScan service. InterPro contains multiple databases of protein families, domains and motifs and InterProScan will submit a protein sequence to a search of these databases. It will also do extra analysis such as transmembrane…
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Create your own Primer Database.nsub from an Excel spreadsheet
Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy way of converting that huge primer collection you have into a format that MacVector can use? Well, luckily there is! There is a utility called “Primer Converter” that you can download from our website. To use the utility you first need to get your primers into…
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Restriction enzyme analysis in MacVector and REBASE
Although there are two different ways to perform restriction enzyme analysis with MacVector, there are also additional places where restriction enzyme sites are shown. All these tools use the same set of restriction enzyme files to recognise enzymes. These files are updated regularly from the REBASE database. The restriction enzymes are divided into multiple files.…