In article <3252D20F.33F2 at physci.ucla.edu>, ecastro at physci.ucla.edu wrote:
> Does anyone know of free or shareware plasmid drawing software for Macs?
>> Thank to all in advance!
>> E. Castro-Vargas
I have written a plasmid drawing program, primarily for our lab use (so it
is anything but polished), which I have released as Freeware. It converts
lists of restriction sites and fragment/gene positions into Postscript
files.
Its weak points in short
- It is a Hypercard stack, so you need Hypercard to run it (luckily, speed
is no problem, there are no processor intensive steps involved)
- The output are Postscript files in Illustrator format. To view and to
further edit the picture (which you will have to, see below), you need
either Adobe Illustrator, or the Shareware EPStoPICT, which produces a
fully editable, object oriented PICT version of the graphics.
- The program does not care for overlapping labels, so in most cases you
must do some fine-tuning
On the other hand, the program
- allows "electronic cloning", so you can quickly construct new plasmids
from those already entered in the program
- can draw all plasmids at the same size, but also using the same (or any
you want) scale (that was the primary reason for me to write the program,
most commercial programs had (still have?) no way to specify the drawing
scale (except by different magnification in the page setup)
- draws linear and circular maps, allows borders of various widths and
fills of grays, arrows...
- Output quality is great, thanks to Postscript
- The price is right :-)
For a more detailed description, including screen shots of the output
graphics, see
<http://yeamob.pci.chemie.uni-tuebingen.de/Archiv/PlasmidMaker.html>
and that is also the place to download the stack:
<http://yeamob.pci.chemie.uni-tuebingen.de/Archiv/Plasmid-Maker.hqx>
(BTW, there is also a stack for the organization of plasmid/strain
collections available)
Kai
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Dr. Kai-Uwe Froehlich, Physiologisch-chemisches Institut,
Hoppe-Seyler-Str. 4, 76072 Tuebingen, Germany
