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, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

. It is intended to be used by

molecular biologists Molecular biology is a branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecule, molecular basis of biological activity in and between Cell (biology), cells, including biomolecule, biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactio ...

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 Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is the process or the result of sequence alignment of three or more biological sequences, generally protein, DNA, or RNA. These alignments are used to infer evolutionary relationships via phylogenetic analysis an ...

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 biology, structural, or evolutionary relationships between ...

( ClustalW,

Muscle Muscle is a soft tissue, one of the four basic types of animal tissue. There are three types of muscle tissue in vertebrates: skeletal muscle, cardiac muscle, and smooth muscle. Muscle tissue gives skeletal muscles the ability to muscle contra ...

and T-Coffee) and editing. * Subsequence search and open reading frames (ORFs) analysis. *

Phylogenetic tree A phylogenetic tree or phylogeny is a graphical representation which shows the evolutionary history between a set of species or taxa during a specific time.Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA. In ...

construction

UPGMA UPGMA (unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean) is a simple agglomerative (bottom-up) hierarchical clustering method. It also has a weighted variant, WPGMA, and they are generally attributed to Sokal and Michener. Note that the unwei ...

, Neighbour joining 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 par ...

PubMed PubMed is an openly accessible, free database which includes 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 Institute ...

, 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 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 that was reverse transcribed (via reverse transcriptase) from an RNA (e.g., messenger RNA or microRNA). cDNA exists in both single-stranded and double-stranded forms and in both natural and engin ...

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 Primer design - easy primer design and testing. Also uses primer3 * Agarose Gel simulation. *

CRISPR CRISPR (; acronym of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is a family of DNA sequences found in the genomes of prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria and archaea. Each sequence within an individual prokaryotic CRISPR is d ...

INDEL analysis. MacVector has a contig assembly plugin called Assembler that uses phred, phrap,

Bowtie The bow tie or dicky bow is a type of neckwear, distinguishable from a necktie because it does not drape down the shirt placket, but is tied just underneath a winged collar. A modern bow tie is tied using a common shoelace knot, which is also ...

, SPAdes,

Velvet Velvet is a type of woven fabric with a dense, even pile (textile), pile that gives it a distinctive soft feel. Historically, velvet was typically made from silk. Modern velvet can be made from silk, linen, cotton, wool, synthetic fibers, silk ...

and cross match. 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

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External links

MacVector homepage
Bioinformatics software Computational science