Methods and software


Methodology-oriented books edited by team members, with contributions from the lab:

®árský V, Cvrčková F (eds.): Plant Cell Morphogenesis - Methods and Protocols. Methods in Molecular Biology Vol. 1080, Springer, 2014.

Cvrčková F, ®árský V (eds.): Plant Cell Morphogenesis - Methods and Protocols, 2nd edition. Methods in Molecular Biology Vol. 1992, Springer, 2019.


Locally produced software tools:

QuACK - quantitative analysis of cytoskeletal kymograms

Paper describing the method (Cvrčková and Oulehlová 2017)

Download software and manual

COBALT alignment conversion to FASTA utility by Radek Bezvoda can be accessed here.

A crash course of entry-level sequence bioinformatics

A web resource on plant formins

(no longer updated)


Tools mirrored from elsewhere on a local server:

The Sequence Manipulation Suite


Orphanware - lost and recovered useful programs:

Higaki laboratory macros for analysing cytoskeletal network density and bundling

Original paper (Higaki et al. 2010)

hig_skewness.txt

hig_255counts.txt

MACAW - Multiple alignment construction and analysis workbench

Original paper (Schuler et al 1991)

Modern approaches to multiple sequence alignment usually focus on automated analysis of large datasets. However, manual or semi-manual multiple alignment of a few sequences still has its place, and corresponding tools are still needed. One such tool, the Multiple Alignment Construction and Analysis Workbench (MACAW), collected so far more than 960 citations, some of them as recent as 2018. Albeit last updated in 1995, MACAW provides a combination of functions unparalleled, to our knowledge, in any later freely available software, offering algorithmic searches for local blocks of sequence similarity, which may then be edited manually using an intuitive graphic user interface. This program can serve as a flexible tool for exploring protein domain organisation, but proved useful also for nucleic acid sequence analysis. Unfortunately, post-XP versions of Microsoft Windows no longer support installation of MACAW, albeit this obstacle can be overcome by a trivial modification of the installation file, which we provide together with a utility for converting MACAW-generated alignments into the FASTA format.

Link to original distribution (dead on post-XP versions of Windows)

Modified archive that can be used under Win7+. No need to install, just unzip into a directory and run Macaw.exe (you might need administrator rights for this).

Mcwreader by Radek Bezvoda - an utility to convert MACAW alignment files (*.mcw) to FASTA. Unzip into a directory and run Mcwreader.exe (Java required).

Tom Hall´s BioEdit

Original paper is: Hall, T.A. (1999) BioEdit: A User-Friendly Biological Sequence Alignment Editor and Analysis Program for Windows 95/98/NT. Nucleic Acids Symposium Series, 41, 95-98. I cannot get hold of a copy (this volume is not even online at the publisher site, help would be appreciated!) but at least here is the manual thanks to colleagues from Masaryk University.

The latest setup file (version 7.2.6.1), OK for Windows 10, recovered from an Internet Archive copy of the now-defunct original site thanks to the Wayback Machine.