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Author: Chris

  • NIH Research Festival 2017

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    The MacVector team will be at the NIH Research Festival this coming Thursday and Friday. We enjoy the tent show and look forward to meeting NIH MacVector users both new and old, and anybody who is interested in learning to use the easiest to use sequence analysis application for the Mac. Learn about the new…

  • How to check the orientation of a ligated insert using MacVector’s Restriction Digest and Agarose Gel tools.

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    How to check the orientation of a ligated insert using MacVector’s Restriction Digest and Agarose Gel tools.

  • Annotating a gene in MacVector

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    Creating biologically accurate AND beautiful maps of your plasmids is easy in MacVector. All you need to do is select some sequence, then open the FEATURES EDITOR. Every annotation is fully compatible with the Genbank specification and Feature Table.

  • Downloading hits from the MacVector 15.5 BLAST Map results tab

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    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…

  • Controlling Automatic ORF Display

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    MacVector 15.5 automatically scans every DNA sequence window for open reading frames and displays the results in the Map tab. The setting for this are controlled by the MacVector | Preferences | DNA Map pane, along with the automatic Show restriction sites settings. The Minimum Number of Codons setting is fairly obvious. 5’ ends are…

  • Use the BLAST Map to better identify blast hits

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    Chris
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    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…

  • Generating a primer report to send to your Oligo Synthesis service

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    QuickTest Primer is a great tool for primer design. Paired with Primer Design/Test (Pairs) it gives you great control and flexibility for designing primers with tails, mismatches, silent mutations, one out sites and more. Once you’ve designed your primer the next step is to get it synthesized. QuickTest Primer will produce a PDF report of…

  • How to toggle between 1 and 3 letter amino acid codes

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    MacVector displays amino acid translations in many different result windows. You can drill down to the residue level in the Map tab and see translations of CDS and other translatable features and see translations in the plain text views and the Quicktest Primer interface. The translations can be viewed as either single letter codes or…

  • MacVector’s compatibility with different versions of macOS/OS X

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    We strive to ensure MacVector has good forwards and backwards compatibility. For example, MacVector 15.1 will still open files created with the very first version of MacVector! However, since Apple releases a new operating system every year, and generally make fairly significant “under the hood” changes, it is just not possible to support every version…

  • Clone construction using Digest/Ligate rather than Copy/Paste

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    We’ve previously looked at using Edit | Copy and Edit | Paste to quickly and simply create new constructs using Restriction Enzyme sites. Here’s an alternative approach, using the Digest and Ligate buttons and the Cloning Clipboard. The sequence window Map tab has two buttons called Digest and Ligate. These work in a very similar…