Category: Techniques

  • Quickly design a pair of primers to amplify a feature

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    Chris
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    Designing a pair of primers to amplify a single feature is pretty quick with MacVector. Select a feature in the MAP tab. Run Primer Design/Test(Pairs). Ensure the dropdown menu is set to AMPLIFY FEATURE. Click OK. Check the summary shows that primers have been found and select the spreadsheet and graphical view. Click OK.

  • Simulated Agarose Gels

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    Chris
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    MacVector 14.5 has a Agarose Gel interface which allows you to view photo-realistic recreations of restriction digests of linear and circular DNA molecules. The gels look so realistic that users have had a hard time telling photos of their own digests from the simulation in MacVector. When you first use the new tool and compare…

  • Cloning Clipboard: Documenting the history of a construct

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    Chris
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    Designing and documenting cloning strategies is easy with the Cloning Clipboard. You can perform quite complex ligations by simply dragging compatible ends together. Not only that but every step is documented and recorded in the resulting sequence, so you always know where each fragment came from. Ligating a single fragment into a vector is as…

  • Quickly checking a small sequencing project

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    Chris
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    For analysing large sequencing datasets, whether de novo or mapping reads against a reference you need Assembler. However, many times you do not need a powerful tool but just a quick way to check some sequencing data. For example for checking small sequencing projects, such as a site directed mutagenesis, looking for SNPs in a…

  • MacVector 12.7 Training Workshop, LMB, Cambridge

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    Chris
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    When: Thursday 19th September, 2013, 2:00 – 4:00, Where: Max Perutz Lecture Theatre, LMB Chris Lindley of MacVector, Inc. will be giving a workshop for both novice and advanced users of MacVector, reviewing both basic and advanced functions in MacVector. In particular, he will highlight the new functionality introduced over the past two years to MacVector.…

  • Subcloning using the Cloning Clipboard

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    Chris
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    Cloning on MacVector has always been an easy procedure. Every digestion places a fragment on the cloning clipboard which then allows you to ligate that fragment into a vector. However, this limitation has now gone with the Cloning Clipboard. The Cloning Clipboard allows you to store a history containing fragments from previous digestions. Not only…

  • QuickTest Primer: Designing Primers in MacVector

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    Chris
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    MacVector has a brand new tool for designing primers. QuickTest Primer completely changes the way primers can be designed on a computer. It simplifies primer design by showing your primer and its statistics in realtime. Does your primer have a hairpin? Nudge it along your template until the hairpin goes? Want to add a restriction…

  • Importing features from a Genome Browser

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    Chris
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    (updated March 21, 2018) MacVector’s Import Features tool allows you to import annotation from many Genome Browsers (e.g. Ensemble, UCSC, etc). MacVector can annotate an empty or annotated sequence. BED, GFF, GTF, and GFF3 formats GFF, GTF, GFF3 & BED files are all file formats that are used to store annotation (features) generally without containing any…

  • Showing features as bases or a translation in a plasmid map

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    Chris
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    Everybody has different tastes and giving everybody identical plasmid maps is unfair! So MacVector is designed to be as flexible as possible to allow you to make your maps look like YOU want then to look. In this theme was a recent change where appropriate features can be shown as residues when there is sufficient…

  • MacVector 12.5: Creating alignments with T-Coffee and Muscle

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    Chris
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    With MacVector 12.5 we’ve added additional multiple sequence alignment (MSA) algorithms. Muscle and T-coffee have been added to the Multiple Sequence Alignment editor complementing the existing ClustalW algorithm. We’ve wanted both of these for a while now and judging from the results of last year’s survey so have many users. Both T-Coffee and Muscle are…