Summer seems to be ending faster than usual here in Wisconsin, home of DNASTAR. We wish a colorful fall season to everyone in the northern hemisphere, and a successful fall term to those in academia. To our friends in the southern hemisphere, we hope winter ends soon so you can enjoy a fabulous spring!

We’ve had a busy summer at DNASTAR, with the release of Lasergene 16 as well as lots of new content on the website. I wanted to point some new resources you might find useful.

• On the blog, we have an updated interview with bioinformatics expert, Eric Cabot Ph.D. about open-source NGS software. We’ve updated the post for 2019 and added an infographic you might find useful.

• We have new instructions for performing PCR site-directed mutagenesis using Lasergene’s protein and primer design tools. This workflow is new to Lasergene 16 and is designed to help improve the developability of a protein by predicting which mutations may lead to increased protein stability. In this post, we show how the new workflow can both replicate and improve upon findings from an older experimental study on the lambda repressor protein.

• I’ve also created a new video walking you through our Protein Design workflow. This workflow helps you find and test useful protein variants in seconds using hotspot scanning and mutation modeling. This video features user-friendly “title cards” instead of a wordy narration. Shoot me an email to let me know what you think of this style of video. Do you feel like the title cards make the workflow easier to understand?

• Finally, we are currently conducting a short survey for those using long-read sequencing or thinking about doing so. If either of these apply to you, we’d appreciate your input about which assembly and analysis features you are looking for. We’re in the process of developing long read software and would love to know which features you would find useful and/or indispensable.

I hope you find the resources above useful. Please let me know if you have any feedback or questions on these items. As always, we are here to help you succeed in your sequence and protein structure analysis projects!

Best regards,
Sharon

Sharon Page
Senior Content Developer