Category: Tips
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Assembler: Using the coverage map of the Reference Contig editor to analyze your assembly
There are two main steps to creating a reference assembly. Mapping your reads against your reference sequence and then analysing the alignment for variations. Knowing the depth of reads, or coverage, of an alignment is important for both of these stages. A low average depth of coverage means that you have less confidence in the…
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Choosing the default application to open a file type
Sometimes you’ll find that when you double click on a document (for example a protein sequence) that it opens in the wrong application. Generally this has resulted from recently installing a new application that has registered itself as the default application that you normally use to open that document. This will overwrite your default application.…
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Updating to Keyserver 7.0
KeyServer 7.0 was released a few months back. There is no need to upgrade your license server for MacVector. However, if you do want to upgrade then you must download the latest installer direct from Sassafras. This version (7.0.0.3) contains important bug fixes and is a later version than the KeyServer installer on the MacVector…
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Using old subsequence files with MacVector
Sometimes when a subsequence file, that has been created by an version of MacVector prior to MacVector 11, has been stored on a remote filesystem or has been emailed MacVector will refuse to open the file. Mac files are generally comprised of two pieces: A data fork and the resource fork. Prior to the release…
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Problems with DMG appearing not to mount.
Sometimes when you download the MacVector disk image and try to mount it nothing appears to happen. Generally this is because although it has been mounted a Finder window has not popped up. It also affects those of us with messy desktop (not me of course!). If you have many files then you might miss…
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MacVector 10.6 and earlier and Lion
If you have upgraded to Lion and you’re running MacVector 10 to 10.6 (earlier versions will not run) then anytime MacVector displays an error message it will crash. MacVector 10.6 was developed before even Snow Leopard was released and is quite long in the tooth now. Why not take this opportunity to upgrade to MacVector…
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Useful help resources for learning MacVector
MacVector is designed to be easy to use. However, there’s a great amount of functionality in there. So if you are new to using MacVector or you’ve recently upgraded from an older version then you might be interested to know that we have some downloadable resources to help you. The first one, which we recommend…
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Designing primers that do not bind at multiple places in your template
The default settings for Primer3 do not actually check for whether a primer will bind at multiple places in the template. To turn this on use the PRIMER vs PRODUCT setting in the PRIMER BINDING tab (the Primer3 parameter is “PRIMER_MAX_TEMPLATE_MISPRIMING”). The default value is -1, which means do not check. Change this to 1…
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MacVector, Assembler and network licensing.
We recently changed the way that Assembler network licenses are shared out to make it easier for many users to share a single license. Previously an Assembler license was checked out whenever you loaded MacVector with Assembler. However, now an Assembler license is only checked out when you start a new assembly project or open…
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Updated Restriction Enzyme files
There are a few updated restriction enzyme files available for download. This file contains the latest Gateway and TOPO sites, and this file is contains the Common Enzymes file together with the updated sites. You can read about how to do Gateway cloning with MacVector here. Incidentally you can select multiple sites for copying by…