Adrian Walden (waldena at tawa.fri.cri.nz) wrote:
: Hi, I require a contact address for the producers of the Macvector
: software package. Furthermore I am interested in suggestions for
: alternatives to this package. I wish to carry out sequence analysis as
: featured in the GCG package (not available at this institute).
: Thanks
: Adrian
Hi,
The address for Kodak which sells MacVector is:
Scientific Imaging Systems
Eastman Kodak Company
25 Science Park
New Haven, CT 06511
Tel: (800)225-5352 or (716)588-2572
Part of the reason I responded is that I would like to know if
anyone has had any luck with the BandScanner software to read gels
scanned with flatbed scanner. We find that the software is
(in our hands) pretty much useless as it picks up too many faint
background bands, and the resulting data needs to edited heavily.
The other software, MacVector and AssemblyLign, works pretty good.
My only complaints are that there are some sequence length limits
in MacVector and that when searching ENTREZ EST's you have to
manually switch between disks 3 and 4 for as many sequences as
you requested. This can be avoided by using two CD-ROM drives
or by copying the data to the hard disk.
I like the alignment scheme using different colors in
AssemblyLign, but I don't like the fact that you can't lock
the relative positions of gels so that when new data is added
in the middle of a gel, the remaining gels would shift to the
right. In Staden's software this is automatic. If you are
sequencing 30 kb pieces with repetitive sequences, you can
spend a considerable amount of time manually shifting gels into
alignment. The best we could to to avoid this is to work with
contigs that contain only part of our sequence (up to about
5 kb at a time) and stitch the consensus sequences together
at the end.
Good luck, A. Otsuka
