MacVector is a commercial sequence analysis application for Apple Macintosh computers running

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

. It is intended to be used by

molecular biologists Molecular biology is the branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecular basis of biological activity in and between cells, including biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactions. The study of chemical and physica ...

to help analyze, design, research and document their experiments in the laboratory. MacVector 18.1 is a

Universal Binary The universal binary format is, in Apple parlance, a format for executable files that run natively on either PowerPC or Intel-manufactured IA-32 or Intel 64 or ARM64-based Macintosh computers. The format originated on NeXTStep as " Multi-Archit ...

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 Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) may refer to the process or the result of sequence alignment of three or more biological sequences, generally protein, DNA, or RNA. In many cases, the input set of query sequences are assumed to have an evolution ...

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. Ali ...

(

ClustalW Clustal is a series of widely used computer programs used in bioinformatics for multiple sequence alignment. There have been many versions of Clustal over the development of the algorithm that are listed below. The analysis of each tool and its ...

Muscle Skeletal muscles (commonly referred to as muscles) are Organ (biology), 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 ...

and

T-Coffee T-Coffee (Tree-based Consistency Objective Function for Alignment Evaluation) is a multiple sequence alignment software using a progressive approach. It generates a library of pairwise alignments to guide the multiple sequence alignment. It can a ...

) and editing. * Subsequence search and

open reading frames In molecular biology, open reading frames (ORFs) are defined as spans of DNA sequence between the start and stop codons. Usually, this is considered within a studied region of a prokaryotic DNA sequence, where only one of the six possible readin ...

(ORFs) analysis. * Phylogenetic tree construction

UPGMA UPGMA (unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean) is a simple agglomerative (bottom-up) hierarchical clustering method. The method is generally attributed to Sokal and Michener. The UPGMA method is similar to its ''weighted'' variant, th ...

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 The GenBank sequence database is an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. It is produced and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; a part ...

PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain ...

, and

UniProt UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived fro ...

. * Perform online

BLAST Blast or The Blast may refer to: *Explosion, a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner *Detonation, an exothermic front accelerating through a medium that eventually drives a shock front Film * ''Blast'' (1997 film), ...

searches. * Protein analysis. * Contig assembly and

chromatogram In chemical analysis, chromatography is a laboratory technique for the Separation process, 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 ...

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 Agarose gel electrophoresis is a method of gel electrophoresis used in biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, and clinical chemistry to separate a mixed population of macromolecules such as DNA or proteins in a matrix of agarose, one of the t ...

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 bac ...

INDEL analysis. MacVector has a contig assembly plugin called

Assembler Assembler may refer to: Arts and media * Nobukazu Takemura, avant-garde electronic musician, stage name Assembler * Assemblers, a fictional race in the ''Star Wars'' universe * Assemblers, an alternative name of the superhero group Champions of A ...

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 The bow tie is a type of necktie. A modern bow tie is tied using a common shoelace knot, which is also called the bow knot for that reason. It consists of a ribbon of fabric tied around the collar of a shirt in a symmetrical manner so that ...

, SPAdes,

Velvet Weave details visible on a purple-colored velvet fabric Velvet is a type of woven tufted fabric in which the cut threads are evenly distributed, with a short pile, giving it a distinctive soft feel. By extension, the word ''velvety'' means ...

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 Sparkle may refer to: * Sparkle (catamaran), a catamaran designed by Angus Primrose * Sparkle (drink), a lemon-flavored soft drink * Sparkle, a brand of paper towels owned by Georgia-Pacific * Sparkle Plenty, a character in the ''Dick Tracy'' c ...

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

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External links

MacVector homepage
Bioinformatics software Computational science