Re: [ccp4bb] Off topic: vector map editing and DNA sequence alignment software
Hello folks, A couple of years ago, we had a related discussion which I cut paste below. I still use Vector NTI which is expensive and bloated, but works well. I've also had good experiences with Gentle which is free and open source. Darren Thanks for the 38 replies, both on and off the bboard. I have tested some of them and my favorites so far are ApE and Gentle which are free and quite good. But there may be others that are also good and I missed. Summary: *Firstly*, good advice from Warren DeLano: 1. Be wary of relying upon free tools not based on open-source code. 2. Be extremely wary of free tools which come with a license manager. 3. Instead favor free software tools which strictly meet the established definitions of: Open Source: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd, Free Software: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html, or Public Domain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain since it is *only* those tools that can be safely taken for granted over the long haul. But be prepared to pay good money for good software! *Secondly*, if you are going to stop using VectorNTI, export valuable files in .gb format before the program locks. If this happens, contact Invitrogen and they (might) issue a short time extension as they did for me. *Recommended programs:* *Geneious *and *CLCbio *workbench are professional polished products competing with VectorNTI – but CLC free version is just a plasmid viewer really. Sebastiano and others - much much easier than VectorNTI is *ApE *( http://www.biology.utah.edu/jorgensen/wayned/ape/), which is multi-platform and very easy to use for simple tasks. I tried ApE and was really impressed, once I got past the very simple looking format. This would do most of the things required for designing vectors and works with .gb format files – Darren *Serial cloner *(http://serialbasics.free.fr/Serial_Cloner.html) suggested by James Stroud. It works only with fasta or .xdna files – so is really a DNA editor and seems to have limited Protein analysis functions, even displaying translated ORFs above DNA sequence. But splicing DNA sequences together seems efficient. Mark Brooks - recommended *BioEdit*: http://www.mbio.ncsu.edu/BioEdit/bioedit.html It has an old fashioned cluttered interface, but does do sequence editing, translation into proteins, ClustalW alignments and contig assemblies (a bit like ContigExpress in Vector NTI). It opens ABI files for sequencing data, to view the chromatograms. It uses the external programs such as clustalw alignments or cap3 to do the contig assemblies, and its licence doesn't expire! For storing everything, I put my primers, plasmid sequences, insert sequences in a MySQL database, with an HTML front end I wrote: http://plasmidb.sourceforge.net/ *Plasmi::db *also has a homespun feel to it, and only works with Firefox, for example (not other browsers). There is a primer designer page, for traditional cloning by restriction digestion etc.. I can't pretend it's in the same league as Vector NTI, though. The data is stored in a non-proprietary format; database tables which can be viewed with either the HTML pages, or MS Excel, for example. Andy Gulick recommends the *Workbench* suite at the *San Diego Supercomputer Center*. It allows you to maintain a database of protein and DNA sequence, has many tools, and allows you to create subprojects to help organize. http://workbench.sdsc.edu Yong-Fu Li suggested *Lasergene*, but not enthusiastically due to requirement to reformat files and not very good editing functions. Roger Dodd - *PlasmaDNA *which seems pretty good for the basics http://research.med.helsinki.fi/plasmadna/ . Christian Biertümpfel recommends another free tool: *pDRAW32 *( http://www.acaclone.com/ ). It runs natively under Windows and with the emulator wine on Linux. Francis Reyes - Not sure if it's been mentioned, but I personally use *EnzymeX *(http://mekentosj.com/enzymex/) .Also recommends PDF library organizer Papers (http://mekentosj.com/papers/) to be exceptional. Juan Sanchez Weatherby - GCK2 (*GeneConstructionKit*) and another * GeneInspector*. They where pretty amazing and with lots of features for plasmid design, keeping history, sharing, and lots more. I suppose they must have improved quite a lot over the years. I can't remember what the license was like (money wise) but I think you can download a free version (doesn't let you save or print things but shows what you can actually do with them). The link you need to find them is http://www.textco.com/products/index.html Bryan Lepore – Lots can be done just with with [1] *expasy tools *and [2] *sequence manipulation suite*, which is entirely downloadable for local use. http://www.bioinformatics.org/sms2/about.html (Darren says: I agree *SMS *is very useful indeed and can be run via their website – no installation) There is *GENtle *which has a whole slew of tools associated with it. There are versions for several platforms.
Re: [ccp4bb] Off topic: vector map editing and DNA sequence alignment software
Dear CCP4Pers, also j5 might be a good choice. I am not personally familiar with the software, so I would happy to hear any comments. It also seems to cope with modern cloning techniques like SLIC. clicking away at http://j5.jbei.org/index.php/Main_Page Regards, Juha On 27 September 2011 18:42, Florian Schmitzberger schmitzber...@crystal.harvard.edu wrote: Dear All, What type of software are people commonly using these days for vector/plasmid map editing, making/visualizing vector maps, and aligning (small to medium size) DNA sequencing data? Preferably, it should not be too expensive and be able to write text files, readable by other programs. I am familiar with VectorNTI, which is great for vector visualization and editing; but I find it somewhat expensive. Sequencher seems good to quickly align DNA sequences (such as from DNA sequencing) with templates, but is not free. I have been using ApE for while for alignments, but aligning many sequences is more cumbersome than in Sequencher; I have not tested if Sequencher is good at visualizing and editing plasmid maps. Ideally, I would like to have a single program for both purposes (vector editing and DNA sequence comparison). Does something like that exist? What are the alternatives to above programs? Thank you in advance. Florian --- Florian Schmitzberger, PhD Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology Harvard Medical School 250 Longwood Avenue, Seeley G. Mudd 123 Boston, MA 02115, US Tel: 001 617 432 5603 -- Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped. -Elbert Hubbard Juha Vahokoski Kalliotie 16 as. 10 90500 Oulu Finland mobile:+358 40 5286 778
[ccp4bb] Off topic: vector map editing and DNA sequence alignment software
Dear All, What type of software are people commonly using these days for vector/ plasmid map editing, making/visualizing vector maps, and aligning (small to medium size) DNA sequencing data? Preferably, it should not be too expensive and be able to write text files, readable by other programs. I am familiar with VectorNTI, which is great for vector visualization and editing; but I find it somewhat expensive. Sequencher seems good to quickly align DNA sequences (such as from DNA sequencing) with templates, but is not free. I have been using ApE for while for alignments, but aligning many sequences is more cumbersome than in Sequencher; I have not tested if Sequencher is good at visualizing and editing plasmid maps. Ideally, I would like to have a single program for both purposes (vector editing and DNA sequence comparison). Does something like that exist? What are the alternatives to above programs? Thank you in advance. Florian --- Florian Schmitzberger, PhD Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology Harvard Medical School 250 Longwood Avenue, Seeley G. Mudd 123 Boston, MA 02115, US Tel: 001 617 432 5603
Re: [ccp4bb] Off topic: vector map editing and DNA sequence alignment software
Hi Florian, May be you can try the software from CLC bio. The full version can be used as trial for four weeks and the free limited one forever! I think you can do most of your things with the limited one. The link to download the software is www.clcbio.com/index.php?id=532. Regards, Mahmudul Hasan PhD Student Dept of Biochemistry and Structural Biology Center for Molecular Protein Science PO Box 124 221 00 Lund Sweden On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 5:42 PM, Florian Schmitzberger schmitzber...@crystal.harvard.edu wrote: Dear All, What type of software are people commonly using these days for vector/plasmid map editing, making/visualizing vector maps, and aligning (small to medium size) DNA sequencing data? Preferably, it should not be too expensive and be able to write text files, readable by other programs. I am familiar with VectorNTI, which is great for vector visualization and editing; but I find it somewhat expensive. Sequencher seems good to quickly align DNA sequences (such as from DNA sequencing) with templates, but is not free. I have been using ApE for while for alignments, but aligning many sequences is more cumbersome than in Sequencher; I have not tested if Sequencher is good at visualizing and editing plasmid maps. Ideally, I would like to have a single program for both purposes (vector editing and DNA sequence comparison). Does something like that exist? What are the alternatives to above programs? Thank you in advance. Florian --- Florian Schmitzberger, PhD Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology Harvard Medical School 250 Longwood Avenue, Seeley G. Mudd 123 Boston, MA 02115, US Tel: 001 617 432 5603
Re: [ccp4bb] Off topic: vector map editing and DNA sequence alignment software
Hi Florian, Have a look at Serial Cloner - it's free, runs on OS X, Linux and Windows, and is really quite powerful - including the ability to export single or multiple sequences to FASTA format text files (however, it can only align two sequences at the time I'm afraid): http://serialbasics.free.fr/Serial_Cloner.html HTH, Luca Luca Jovine, Ph.D. Assistant Professor EMBO Young Investigator Karolinska Institutet Department of Biosciences and Nutrition Center for Biosciences Hälsovägen 7, SE-141 83 Huddinge, Sweden Voice: +46.(0)8.524-81136 FAX: +46.(0)8.6081-501 E-mail: luca.jov...@ki.se W3: http://jovinelab.org On 27 Sep 2011, at 17:42 , Florian Schmitzberger wrote: Dear All, What type of software are people commonly using these days for vector/plasmid map editing, making/visualizing vector maps, and aligning (small to medium size) DNA sequencing data? Preferably, it should not be too expensive and be able to write text files, readable by other programs. I am familiar with VectorNTI, which is great for vector visualization and editing; but I find it somewhat expensive. Sequencher seems good to quickly align DNA sequences (such as from DNA sequencing) with templates, but is not free. I have been using ApE for while for alignments, but aligning many sequences is more cumbersome than in Sequencher; I have not tested if Sequencher is good at visualizing and editing plasmid maps. Ideally, I would like to have a single program for both purposes (vector editing and DNA sequence comparison). Does something like that exist? What are the alternatives to above programs? Thank you in advance. Florian --- Florian Schmitzberger, PhD Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology Harvard Medical School 250 Longwood Avenue, Seeley G. Mudd 123 Boston, MA 02115, US Tel: 001 617 432 5603
Re: [ccp4bb] Off topic: vector map editing and DNA sequence alignment software
Hi Florian - I've used Geneious for a few years now and been pleased with it. Also a freemium business model: Basic version is free, and Pro version price depends on the term and type of license (student, academic/government, or commercial). I find the Basic version suits my limited molecular biology needs pretty well. They also have occasional Geneious Days (today happens to be one!) when the Basic version can use all the features of the Pro version. Available for Linux/Mac/Windows in both 32- and 64-bit. http://www.geneious.com/ -- Jared Sampson Xiangpeng Kong Lab NYU Langone Medical Center 550 First Ave MSB 329 New York, NY 10016 212-263-7898 On Sep 27, 2011, at 2:32 PM, Luca Jovine wrote: Hi Florian, Have a look at Serial Cloner - it's free, runs on OS X, Linux and Windows, and is really quite powerful - including the ability to export single or multiple sequences to FASTA format text files (however, it can only align two sequences at the time I'm afraid): http://serialbasics.free.fr/Serial_Cloner.html HTH, Luca Luca Jovine, Ph.D. Assistant Professor EMBO Young Investigator Karolinska Institutet Department of Biosciences and Nutrition Center for Biosciences Hälsovägen 7, SE-141 83 Huddinge, Sweden Voice: +46.(0)8.524-81136 FAX: +46.(0)8.6081-501 E-mail: luca.jov...@ki.semailto:luca.jov...@ki.se W3: http://jovinelab.orghttp://jovinelab.org/ On 27 Sep 2011, at 17:42 , Florian Schmitzberger wrote: Dear All, What type of software are people commonly using these days for vector/plasmid map editing, making/visualizing vector maps, and aligning (small to medium size) DNA sequencing data? Preferably, it should not be too expensive and be able to write text files, readable by other programs. I am familiar with VectorNTI, which is great for vector visualization and editing; but I find it somewhat expensive. Sequencher seems good to quickly align DNA sequences (such as from DNA sequencing) with templates, but is not free. I have been using ApE for while for alignments, but aligning many sequences is more cumbersome than in Sequencher; I have not tested if Sequencher is good at visualizing and editing plasmid maps. Ideally, I would like to have a single program for both purposes (vector editing and DNA sequence comparison). Does something like that exist? What are the alternatives to above programs? Thank you in advance. Florian --- Florian Schmitzberger, PhD Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology Harvard Medical School 250 Longwood Avenue, Seeley G. Mudd 123 Boston, MA 02115, US Tel: 001 617 432 5603 /PRE html body br / This email message, including any attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain information that is proprietary, confidential, and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure, or distribution is prohibited. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender by return email and delete the original message. Please note, the recipient should check this email and any attachments for the presence of viruses. The organization accepts no liability for any damage caused by any virus transmitted by this email.br / = /body /html PRE
