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

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

. It is intended to be used by Molecular Biologists

Molecular biology

Molecular biology is the branch of biology that deals with the molecular basis of biological activity. This field overlaps with other areas of biology and chemistry, particularly genetics and biochemistry...

 to help analyze, design, research and document their experiments in the laboratory.

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
  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. Aligned sequences of nucleotide or amino acid residues are...
  
   (ClustalW) and editing.
• Subsequence search and open reading frames (ORFs) analysis.
• Phylogenetic tree
  Phylogenetic tree
  A phylogenetic tree or evolutionary tree is a branching diagram or "tree" showing the inferred evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon similarities and differences in their physical and/or genetic characteristics...
  
   construction UPGMA
  UPGMA
  UPGMA is a simple agglomerative or hierarchical clustering method used in bioinformatics for the creation of phenetic trees...
  
  , Neighbour joining with bootstrapping and consensus trees
• Online Database searching - Search public databases at the NCBI such as Genbank
  GenBank
  The GenBank sequence database is an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. This database is produced and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information as part of the International Nucleotide Sequence...
  
  , PubMed
  PubMed
  PubMed is a free database accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health maintains the database as part of the Entrez information retrieval system...
  
  , and UniProt
  UniProt
  UniProt is a comprehensive, high-quality and freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many of which are derived from genome sequencing projects...
  
  .
• Perform online BLAST
  BLAST
  In bioinformatics, Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, or BLAST, is an algorithm for comparing primary biological sequence information, such as the amino-acid sequences of different proteins or the nucleotides of DNA sequences...
  
   searches.
• Protein analysis.
• Contig assembly and chromatogram editing
• Aligning cDNA against genomic templates
• Creating dot plots
  Dot plot (bioinformatics)
  A dot plot is a graphical method that allows the comparison of two biological sequences and identify regions of close similarity between them. It is a kind of recurrence plot.-Introduction:...
  
   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.
• PCR Primer design - easy primer design and testing. Also uses primer3

MacVector has a contig assembly plugin called Assembler that uses phred

Phred quality score

Phred quality scores were originally developed by the program Phred to help in the automation of DNA sequencing in the Human Genome Project. Phred quality scores are assigned to each base call in automated sequencer traces...

, phrap

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 Human Genome Project...

 and cross match.

History

MacVector was originally developed by IBI in 1994 . It was acquired by Kodak, and subsequently Oxford Molecular . Oxford Molecular was merged into Accelrys in 2001. It was acquired by MacVector, Inc on the 1st of January, 2007 .

External links

• MacVector homepage
• MacVector Forums

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