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Tag: weeklytip

  • MacVectorTip: How to Customize the Toolbars of MacVector windows

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    Chris
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    Like many Mac applications, MacVector takes full advantage of macOS’s ability to add, delete and rearrange the action buttons on window toolbars. To make these changes, right-click (or [ctrl]-click) in the gray space on any toolbar and a context-sensitive menu will appear. Choose Customize Toolbar and a dialog will be displayed with all of the…

  • MacVectorTip: macOS Dark Mode and forcing MacVector to open in Light Mode

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    Chris
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    “Dark Mode makes it easier to stay focused on your work because your content stands out while darkened controls and windows recede into the background” If you use Dark Mode with the Auto setting, then with the short winter days in the northern hemisphere (for our southern hemisphere friends please save this email for six…

  • MacVectorTip: Create custom Codon Usage Tables for ORF analysis and reverse translation

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    Chris
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    MacVector uses codon usage tables (also called “Codon Bias”) to help you predict protein coding regions in the Analyze | Nucleic Acid Analysis Toolbox functions and also the protein Analyze | Reverse Translation… function. For example, here are the Plus and Minus strand Staden Codon Preference plots aligned under the Plus/Minus ORFs for a Streptomyces…

  • macOS’s tabbed windows and MacVector

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    Chris
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    One of the lesser known features of macOS is the ability to store all open documents of an application in tabs. Tabs were initially introduced for the Finder, but macOS Mavericks saw them apply to supported application document windows too. MacVector has supported tabs since their introduction, however, by default the Tab Bar is turned…

  • MacVectorTip: Identifying, Selecting and Assembling NGS reads with a variant genotype

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    Chris
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    When analyzing/assembling/aligning NGS data, there are many scenarios where you might want to separate out the reads representing different genotypes or variant sequences. MacVector makes this very easy. Take a reference sequence and choose Analyze | Align to Reference. Now click the Add Seqs button and select and add your NGS data files. NOTE: if…

  • MacVectorTip: correctly flagging PacBio and Oxford Nanopore datasets for assembly by Flye

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    Chris
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    MacVector 17.5 introduced Flye for assembly of PacBio and Oxford Nanopore reads. Flye joins Phrap, Velvet and SPAdes for de novo sequence assembly using along with Bowtie2 and Align To Reference for reference assembly. Flye is an assembler algorithm tuned to assemble low quality long reads such as those produced by the new generation of…

  • MacVectorTip: Assembling Fungal Genomes using SPAdes

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    Chris
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    MacVector with Assembler can assemble bacterial genomes in just minutes on quite modest hardware. Currently MacVector has four de novo assembly tools (SPAdes, Velvet, Flye and Phrap). But what of larger genomes? It is currently impractical to run de novo assemblies of Human genomes on a low cost Mac, though RNA-Seq analyses against the human…

  • MacVectorTip: Viewing external database entries for features in a sequence.

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    Chris
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    Sequences, or regions of sequences, can be linked to external databases. For example an entire sequence entry or for when annotation tools are used to annotate proteins with domain or motif information (for example InterProScan). Very useful for when you want to view more detailed or updated information. Within the Genbank specification, which MacVector extensively…

  • MacVectorTip: How to Customize Window Button Toolbars

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    by

    Chris
    in

    Like many Mac applications, MacVector takes full advantage of the built-in ability to add, delete and rearrange the action buttons on window toolbars. To make these changes, right-click (or [ctrl]-click) in the gray space on any toolbar and a context-sensitive menu will appear. Choose Customize Toolbar and a dialog will be displayed with all of…

  • MacVectorTip: Understanding Color Groups

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    Chris
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    You can align hundreds, or even thousands of protein sequences within MacVector using three different alignment algorithms – ClustalW, MUSCLE or T-Coffee. Once aligned, you may be familiar with the colorful display in the Editor tab. But there’s more to this than pretty colors. The default Color Group in MacVector is one called “Chemical Type”.…