In article <000801c0bed7$3f21a6f0$0800000a at epicyte.com>, yqan at epicyte.com
("yong-qiang An") wrote:
> I am looking for a software for plamsid construction project. I want =
> the software to draw plasmid map with annotated genes, restriction =
> enzymes, to determine cloning sites and gel sizes and so on. I know =
> that there is VectorNT, gene cosntruction kit2 are available. Any =
> suggestion about the softwares and other software are appreciated.
>
Hi
I have written a plasmid drawing program for the Macintosh which I
have released as Freeware. It allows to draw circular or linear maps.
It was originally intended for our lab use, so it is anything but polished.
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 Fröhlich, Physiologisch-chemisches Institut,
Hoppe-Seyler-Str. 4, 76072 Tübingen, Germany
