Testimonials

Sequencher is not just the best sequence analysis program I have used; it is one of the best pieces of software I have used. Period. It is intuitive; it does exactly what I want it to do in pretty much the way I would expect it to work.

After using Sequencher for years as a grad student, I was forced to switch to MacVector as a postdoc in a new lab. Sequencher is so much easier to use than MacVector and has such a superior interface that I used the demo version of Sequencher for months rather than the lab copy of MacVector. Sequencher feels as though it is written by biologists that can write software, rather than programmers attempting to write biological software. Any life scientist who has spent time pulling their hair out over non-intuitive software will greatly appreciate this distinction.

I am involved in resequencing projects for disease association studies. Sequencher was of tremendous help to me in these projects for- discovery of SNPs, detection of known SNPs, intronic/exonic SNPs & amino acid changing SNPs. I have been using it for sequence analysis of ABI data files since 2000. It is easy to operate and user friendly. It was a pleasure to be involved in the beta test program for version 4.6. What I liked in this new version is assembly function & variance table. Assemble to reference by defining assembly parameters using advance expression feature is very useful, it saves a lot of time and sequences can be assembled by defining feature of your choice e.g. sample ID, primer ID, or well position etc. Technical Support group at the Gene Codes Corporation has been very receptive to the idea of introducing variance table. With this feature it is now possible to export genotypes. Using this feature I am not only able to export whole table but also selected few columns using “export selected” option button.

The most popular request I receive in the DNA core lab is: find the good clone among this group of 'candidate' minipreps. Alignment of ABI data files against a 'reference' sequence (template file) quickly eliminates defectives by showing not only base changes but the consequences to the protein translation.The second most popular request is: validate this new maxiprep so it can be given to ... or used for ... or expressed in ... Rapid assembly and editing of total plasmid sequence and then comparison to the reference file on record is all done in Sequencher.The third most popular request is: compare this library of (protein improvement) mutants and tell me which ones have protein changes. This is done by alignment in Sequencher and then formatting the Summary view to display the resulting changes in protein translation.For my own projects, I use Sequencher as a very general multiple-alignment sequence editor. Most recently, I've been using it to make comparisons of genes retrieved from the databases for cross-species cDNA cloning. Showing regions of homology at the protein level and then having the colinear DNA sequence presented in the same view (Summary window) helps find regions suitable for primer design. Turning on the Matching Bases/Residues as Dashes quickly shows regions of homology and divergence. I design primers to either or both depending on the project.

I am very satisfied with how sequencher handles heterozygous calls in autosomal sequencing and potential heteroplasmies in mitochondrial resequencing. I found the forensics addon package for the general forensics community to be very helpful!