Category: Tips
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You can automatically use the Free version of MacVector if your serial number is in use
Starting with MacVector 14.5.1, if your serial number is in use, or if all the KeyServer licenses are in use, you will get a message like this when you start MacVector. If you click on the Continue using Free version button, you still have a surprising amount of functionality. You can open, print and save…
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Clearing the history in the Primer and Find dialogs
Many tools in MacVector store a history of sequences, or search terms, that you have previously used. For example, the Find dialog and Primer Design tools. This is accessed using a drop down menu to the right of the box where you would normally type, or paste, your sequence. This is to allow easy access…
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A few tips on working with digested fragments in the Cloning Clipboard
The Cloning Clipboard is an easy, and flexible, way to design and document your cloning strategies. Here’s two tips on manipulating a single fragment. If you drag a fragment from the Cloning Clipboard to a vector, then you’ll get the ligate dialog. However, if you have already selected a pair of enzyme sites, then the…
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Changing the sequence alignment match and mismatch characters
Many MacVector analysis functions (e.g. Align To Folder, Create Dotplot and Internet Blast Search) display alignments where there is (by default) a vertical “|” character indicating a match between the query and database sequences. While this is very useful for identifying matching residues, sometimes you might be more interested in those residues that do NOT…
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Visualizing ORF analysis results in the MAP tab
The Map tab is a powerful way to visualize and interact with your sequences. You can design primers, ligate and digest fragments from the Cloning Clipboard, visualise translated CDS regions and much more. The Map tab of a Results window is just as flexible as the Map tab of the main sequence window. You can…
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Use File -> New From Clipboard to create new sequence documents
Whenever you have information copied to the clipboard, you can choose File | New From Clipboard and MacVector will interpret any data on the clipboard and create a new document of the appropriate type. While this is most commonly used for DNA and Protein sequence documents, this also works for multiple sequence alignments and data…
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Designing and documenting cloning strategies
Designing cloning strategies is easy with the Cloning Clipboard. You can perform quite complex ligations by simply dragging compatible ends together. However, when you open this construct a year later, you don’t want to have to look back in your lab book to know how you generated it. Neither do you need to! MacVector fully…
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Calculating the PCR annealing temperature for a pair of primers
MacVector not only calculates the melting temperature (Tm) for any primers you design, but also displays the recommended annealing temperature (Ta) that you should use in PCR experiments using those primers. You can access the main MacVector interface for designing pairs of primers using Analyze | Primer Design (Primer3). From here you can ask MacVector…
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Use dot plots to quickly confirm similarity between two sequences
We occasionally get e-mails from users who think that two sequences should align using ClustalW or the Align To Reference function, but the algorithms cannot find any meaningful matches. In these cases, the first thing I do is open both sequences and then create a dot-plot between them using the Analyze | Create Dotplot |…
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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…