MacVector is a commercial sequence analysis application for Apple Macintosh computers running
Mac OS X. It is intended to be used by
molecular biologists to help analyze, design, research and document their experiments in the laboratory. MacVector 18.1 is a
Universal Binary capable of running on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.
Features
MacVector is a collection of sequence analysis algorithms linked to various sequence editors, including a single sequence editor, a
multiple sequence alignment editor and a contig editor. MacVector tries to use a minimum of windows and steps to access all the functionality. Functions include:
*
Sequence alignment
In bioinformatics, a sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA, or protein to identify regions of similarity that may be a consequence of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. Alig ...
(
ClustalW,
Muscle
Skeletal muscles (commonly referred to as muscles) are organs of the vertebrate muscular system and typically are attached by tendons to bones of a skeleton. The muscle cells of skeletal muscles are much longer than in the other types of muscl ...
and
T-Coffee) and editing.
* Subsequence search and
open reading frames (ORFs) analysis.
*
Phylogenetic tree
A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological spec ...
construction
UPGMA,
Neighbour joining
In bioinformatics, neighbor joining is a bottom-up (agglomerative) clustering method for the creation of phylogenetic trees, created by Naruya Saitou and Masatoshi Nei in 1987. Usually based on DNA or protein sequence data, the algorithm req ...
with bootstrapping and consensus trees
* Online Database searching - Search public databases at the NCBI such as
Genbank,
PubMed, and
UniProt.
* Perform online
BLAST searches.
* Protein analysis.
* Contig assembly and
chromatogram
In chemical analysis, chromatography is a laboratory technique for the separation of a mixture into its components. The mixture is dissolved in a fluid solvent (gas or liquid) called the ''mobile phase'', which carries it through a system (a ...
editing
* Aligning
cDNA
In genetics, complementary DNA (cDNA) is DNA synthesized from a single-stranded RNA (e.g., messenger RNA (mRNA) or microRNA (miRNA)) template in a reaction catalyzed by the enzyme reverse transcriptase. cDNA is often used to express a speci ...
against genomic templates
* Creating
dot plots of DNA to DNA, Protein to Protein and DNA to protein.
* Restriction analysis - find and view restriction cut sites. Uses digested fragments to clone genes into vectors. Stores a history of digested fragments allowing multi fragment ligations.
*
PCR PCR or pcr may refer to:
Science
* Phosphocreatine, a phosphorylated creatine molecule
* Principal component regression, a statistical technique
Medicine
* Polymerase chain reaction
** COVID-19 testing, often performed using the polymerase chain r ...
Primer design - easy primer design and testing. Also uses
primer3
*
Agarose Gel simulation.
*
CRISPR
CRISPR () (an acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is a family of DNA sequences found in the genomes of prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria and archaea. These sequences are derived from DNA fragments of bacte ...
INDEL analysis.
MacVector has a contig assembly plugin called
Assembler that uses
phred,
phrap Phrap is a widely used program for DNA sequence assembly. It is part of the Phred-Phrap-Consed package.
History
Phrap was originally developed by Prof. Phil Green for the assembly of cosmids in large-scale cosmid shotgun sequencing within the ...
,
Bowtie, SPAdes,
Velvet and
cross match
Cross-matching or crossmatching is a test performed before a blood transfusion as part of blood compatibility testing. Normally, this involves adding the recipient's blood plasma to a sample of the donor's red blood cells. If the blood is incomp ...
.
As of version 13.0.1 MacVector uses
Sparkle for updating between releases.
History
MacVector was originally developed by IBI in 1994. It was acquired by Kodak, and subsequently Oxford Molecular in 1996. Oxford Molecular was merged into Accelrys in 2001. It was acquired by MacVector, Inc on 1 January 2007.
References
{{reflist
External links
MacVector homepage
Bioinformatics software
Computational science