SnapGene Version 8.0: What's New!
Transcript
Hi there, everybody.
I am Jessica Eaton. I am the person that you may recognize from all the Snapgene mailings, and I sort of help coordinate our Snapgene bulk discount here at Columbia. If you aren't on the Snapgene discount currently, am I still sharing my screen? Yes, I am.
Okay. If you're not on the Snapgene discount currently, it's something you should probably consider. We group everybody together at Columbia to get a discounted license.
Currently, it's about $145 a license versus, I think it's like $350 for a single academic license. So it's a significant savings. And we also do GraphPad Prism, if that's another tool you use.
I'm from Research Computing Services and CUIT, which is a group that really focuses on helping researchers. Along with these softwares, we do other research computing, offer other research computing tools like Globus Data Transfer, HPC, cloud computing stuff. So if you have questions, you can always reach out to Research Computing Services about how to do computing at Columbia.
But as for our agenda today, I just want to check, do you guys still need like an intro to Snapgene? Would you guys appreciate that? Or do you want to sort of dig more into the, you're already like sort of have a good understanding of Snapgene? Maybe we should stick up with the agenda because other people maybe will appreciate it. In the recording, yeah. Oh, I see.
I'll note that I pulled some topics from the people asked for in the registration. And then I, mostly we wanted to also touch on Snapgene 8.0, thank you, which came out in November.
So it has a couple other capabilities as well. So yeah, it looks like I'm going to mostly just turn this over to Dr. Starr. Evan Starr, he's done a couple webinars for us on Snapgene.
He has a PhD from Berkeley in rhizosphere ecology. And he currently works at Snapgene's parent company as a field scientist. So he's very familiar with Snapgene tool.
And so if you have any questions, I will, I know both of you are not great, you can't come off mic, but if you want to drop anything in the chat, I will flag it for Dr. Starr. Okay, I'm going to stop sharing and then turn it over to you, Evan. Perfect.
Thank you, Jessica, and good to see everybody, or good to have everybody on here. Unfortunately, my camera is not working today, but you can Google a picture of me and imagine what I look like as I'm showing you Snapgene. So we can go and follow the agenda, but we can also, if you have any questions, I'll try and keep an eye on that chat, and we can just make sure that we can just cover any questions that come up or whatever would be most useful for everybody.
So as Jessica said, I'm a field application scientist with Snapgene, so I do these webinars, but we can also, you know, I can show you how to learn more about Snapgene on your own or how to contact our support team to help you if there are bugs or nitty-gritty questions that you have or maybe if you have suggestions for how you would like to see the program improved, because that's always something that we're really, you know, we always need is input from the community on, you know, what people would like to see. So we've recently introduced Snapgene 8.0, and what that includes are a lot of more bulk types of functionalities. So if you're familiar with the older versions of Snapgene, it's still very, it's exactly similar, but we can now do some operations on multiple documents all at once.
This is something that was brought to us from the community. Obviously, when you're maybe, say, aligning Sanger sequences to a plasmid, you're not just aligning one or two Sanger sequences. Maybe you want to align a bunch to pick out your best clones, or if you're doing alignments, you don't want to go through and click a bunch of different things.
So we've added some new features for doing a little bit more of these bulk operations, and this is a direction that we'll continue to move into. With the slightly older versions, we've also introduced this little folder viewer here on the left-hand sides. That's kind of a nice way to organize your data and think about it.
So in the very beginning of Snapgene, it was purely a file-based system. So we would go from, you know, Finder or on Windows, you'd just be looking through whichever folders you were most interested in working from. But now we have this concept of kind of a project folder, and so all you need to do is click this little button up here, and you can open up a new folder, and that can be a folder anywhere on your computer or in your shared drive.
So this is a really handy thing to be able to organize your data, and you can see it's still this file-based system. We still have all these same files here and the same folders here as well. It's just kind of a nice way to be able to quickly work within Snapgene.
So that was one of the new features, and I'll show you a couple of these little kind of quick things that we can do as we start getting into the program. There was also a bit of a UI or a user interface update, so we're trying to modernize Snapgene, and we've got some great people who are actually like almost on the psychology side of this for figuring out where people would think that these buttons would go and how they would work. So we're really just trying to make it as intuitive as possible so we can get really deep into the program, but also for people who are brand new or maybe just using this for a class or something like that, we want it to be easy to pick up.
So you'll notice that some of these buttons have moved around a little bit, and that is to try and make this a little bit easier to use. So I think these used to be down here on the bottom, just a minor change just so that all these kind of buttons are in one nice place. There was someone who actually asked about shortcuts or how to do these things, and you'll notice as I'm hovering over, you can see here I'm on a Mac and we've got Command-1 and Command-2.
So one nice way to find shortcuts is to just hover your mouse over any of these buttons and you will find those shortcuts. So we can even do all the, you know, Command-Z. If you're ever wondering about any of them or all of them, we can come up into Help and come down into our keyboard shortcuts, and this will give you a really nice large overview of all of these shortcuts.
I know that our more advanced Snapgene users love these shortcuts and almost don't click anywhere and will just use shortcuts for doing everything that they want. So you can come through here and find all of your favorite ones, or I like this old-fashioned kind of way. You can even print this out if you wanted a printed out version to tape up next to your computer.
So we've got the map view, which is just kind of an overview of our sequence. Obviously, just like before, we can hover over. These are annotations on a plasmid, and we can hover over those to get more information or some of this metadata as well.
We can come into the sequence view, so get really deeper into our DNA or RNA or protein, and look at these sequences here. You'll see on our translated sequences, I'm getting the amino acids being shown here as well, and so that is actually, if we come into Show Features, we can choose what we are able to see. So with this, we also have the Enzymes tab.
I think this hasn't changed very much, and our Features tab, which looks a little different. So Features are basically all of our sequences that we've got on all of our annotations that we've got on our sequence, and this is a nice way where we can start to look through, look at all of our annotations, and again, look at that metadata. And if you're ever working with larger documents, so if you're working with maybe a genome or something like that, and you don't want to go through looking through this map, which could be very large, we can go into this Features and be able to start actually searching for our different, you know, let's find our GFP.
We can find all of our different annotations, and once we select them, we can do a number of things, just like showing them or hiding them or editing them all in bulk. So some ways we can do a little bit more with, you know, documents that maybe have a few more annotations than just your standard plasmid. Again, we've got all of our primers on here, and my absolute favorite view, the History view, if you haven't been using these, try and check it out if you're doing cloning especially.
This is a really handy view to see what has been done to your document, and we'll show you this after I do some cloning steps. But what's really cool about this is this one file here on my computer will keep all of those history changes that I did to this sequence. And so at some point, probably during a demo when I was just messing around with things and showing people how to delete things, I deleted a few bases.
And if I wanted to undo that or maybe resurrect this document, all I need to do is click on this and it will generate a new file without those deleted sequences. And so in this History view, that will have all of those actions that you've done to this individual document, and we can go back to any of those. So especially if we get to more advanced cloning operations, you can see here we can even have branching histories.
So this was actually a vector made by Benjamin Glick, the founder of Snapgene, for some of his work. And so you can see all of the wild history and all of the different types of cloning operations that he did to generate this sequence. So I really like this History view, both in this visual format, or we can also look at it as a text format if you prefer that.
Great. So those are some of the buttons that have maybe moved around a little bit if you're dealing with those. And then these also got a little bit of a refresh, so they might look a little bit different, but they all do the same thing.
Basically, we can choose what enzymes we're seeing on here. So we can click that on to show our enzymes. We can hover over any of those enzymes to see where those cut sites are or what that standard site is.
And some of these will even have some nice little information about them, just in case you're doing a restriction digest and you know it works better in certain conditions. We'll give you a little hint about that. We can also customize which enzymes we're seeing.
So I think by default, it's going to be these unique cutters, so just enzymes that cut once, but we can change this to whatever option that we want. So depending on what you're doing, you can choose whichever set of enzymes you want, or we can come down here at the very bottom and choose what specific enzymes. So we can set up a new list of enzymes.
And this is really handy for if you're doing something like you've got a set of enzymes that are in the freezer or something like that, and you just want to use those. You can set up a new little enzyme list. So basically, come down into this, choose enzymes, move over all those enzymes once, and then you can use those.
Basically, it will be a new little list here. I just made one list for all the unique cutters from one of my other vectors. And so then you can see all of those and where they cut on your sequence.
Perfect. So a little bit about enzymes. Again, there was that question about shortcuts.
You'll see on our enzymes tab, there are shortcuts listed everywhere for how to use all of those different enzymes, or all those different options. We've got some feature options, basically just what annotations we're showing, pretty self-explanatory. We've got our primer options.
So we can choose our hybridization parameters. So basically, when we map primers, we'll set those hybridization parameters. But we can also reset those if you, say, want a little bit more stringent hybridization parameters.
And so then we'd maybe lose some of these primers. But we can turn these on or off, and they'll always appear in this nice purple color. And we can hover over and get that melting temperature, GC content, all of that information.
Our show translations and ORFs is just a little way to show our open reading frames. The other thing that you can do is, if you're ever working with maybe not a plasmid, but a gene of interest that you're working on, and you actually want to see multiple frames. So maybe you're looking at, I don't know, an antibody, and you want to see where your regions are.
We can turn on multiple frames to see all of those amino acids in multiple different frames, including all six frames if you wanted to just go wild. And these will also highlight in green here all of the different open reading frames. This isn't like an advanced algorithm that's looking for open reading frames.
We're just looking for a start codon and a stop codon, basically, and a certain length, I believe. But we can change all of that in these translation options. So I'm just saying, must have a start codon, must be at least 75 amino acids long, and we're looking at standard translation frame.
Great. Show colors is about a little bit of that history of our sequences. So we can turn that on and off.
And then we can also look at alignments. So that's the very basics of working with Snapgene. And I know many of you are already familiar with the program.
Are there any questions about this topic or anything that you guys would like to dive into a little bit more? And feel free to type in the chat. I know not everyone can speak on the microphone. Okay.
We can hop right into a couple of the other things. We talked about annotations. So one thing about Snapgene is we can annotate sequences.
This is now we can do this on multiple documents all at once. So I don't really have a good way to show this, but let's pop open and maybe select a couple of different documents here. So let's say a colleague sent me multiple documents.
So I've got some, you know, maybe just FASTA sequences or anything like that that doesn't have annotations on it already. Or maybe we want to detect new features. One of the new options that we can do is we can select multiple documents at once and go into detect features.
So we can either detect common features. So this is a list of we're in the thousands now of common, you know, features that would be on Plasmid. So GFPs, HIST tags, all those kind of standard cloning options.
And those will be our common features. And so we can annotate all of those annotations on our new sequences now in bulk, starting with Snapgene 8.0. The other option that some people, this is a little bit of a confusing language, but basically you can annotate one sequence from another sequence. So instead of using all of our standard options, you can say, hey, I've got a GenBank file or a .DNA Snapgene file that's got annotations and I've got a new file and I want to annotate those, that new file based on this other file.
That's one way that we can annotate those new sequences based on annotations that we've just got in a file. But most people are just going to use this detect common features option. So this, we can set a threshold for the percent similarity.
We just kind of decided that 96% was the standard, but you can change that however you want. And this will not duplicate our existing features, so we might not really find anything new. But this is a nice way to start to annotate some sequences in bulk, right? When before we would have to go through and click each one, annotate each one, annotate.
So we can come over here into my new document. You can see it didn't find anything on this sequence because there's nothing, there's not this little orange dot where it's lit up and says that there are some unsaved changes. So you can come over here and very handy for us, already highlighted are some of these features that it annotated that weren't on this sequence before.
One thing you may notice is that one new thing that was annotated on here was the cool domain, really odd name that I must have chosen at some point. So one great thing about this annotation, these features, is not only can we come back down and find our detect common features, but if we've got a file downloaded from NCBI, from anything like that, that's got annotations on it, we can also add those to our common features. So this has already been added, but basically what this will do is we can now add this so that any time you run those annotation, either that bulk annotation or from that features and then detect common features, these will be added as custom features that you can automatically just add to your sequence.
So we talked about you can do this one file to another file, or you can add all of those annotations in that file to your big list of common features, and then it will always be annotated on there. If you're ever wondering what features are on there, we can always come up into features and browse our common features, and this will have all of the different features that are included, and you can see what metadata is on here as well. The standard features are just those ones that come built in, but we can also come down into those custom features, and you can see I'm not very good at naming sequences.
I've added a bunch of cool domains and new domains. Basically, any time I've got a sequence, these will now be annotated on there as well. One important trick with this also is to say that it was a CDS or a coding region, and check this little mark here so that it will detect either the exact protein match or an approximate DNA match.
So if you've got a sequence that's got different codons but the same amino acid sequence, it will still annotate that on your sequence. Also, if you're working in a lab group, all of this so far has been on my personal computer, so we're just working with it here, but you probably want to start sharing this with other colleagues. What we can always do is export our features, so we could select all of these, and we can export all of our features so that we can export these features and then bring them in to send them to a colleague who's also using Snapgene, and then they can annotate those exactly how we have.
One thing that we're working on is a little bit of cloud functionality, so what we worked on last time was a little bit of this batch functionality. Next, we're going to be working on a little bit of cloud functionality, so you don't have to email documents or just have things stored on a shared drive. You can set up a little bit of a sharing space that has read-write privileges on it, so you can share that within your lab.
So if you have any thoughts about that or things you would like to see or wouldn't like to see, feel free to bring them up here, or you can always come up into help, ask a question to our scientists, report a bug to our developers, or make a suggestion if there's something that you would like to see, and again, those are always really valuable to us. So any questions about annotations? No, perfect. The cloning operations have not really changed all that much.
We can select our files, but we don't have batch cloning operations quite yet, so that is something that we're also working on. But again, all of our different cloning operations work very similarly. We've got all of those under actions, and what we have is videos for each of these different common cloning operations that you might want to do.
So I really like our videos. These are all on the Snapgene Academy. We also have videos on the actual science behind this, so if you're ever teaching a new grad student or anything like that, these videos will actually show how these different cloning operations work, so you can get a better understanding, not just how to do these operations in Silico, but what they're actually doing.
So that Snapgene Academy is really a useful resource that we've been developing. So if we're going to do some cloning operations, all of this, again, is under actions. We can come into Gibson Assembly and either insert one fragment or insert multiple fragments, and so we can insert a fragment here.
And again, this is just like it would be in the laboratory. So we'll go through the vector, prep the vector, prep our fragment, and generate our product. So it's kind of a step-by-step process.
So if you didn't select already, you can select which vector you want to use from your OpenDNA or other recent documents that you've already used. We can linearize this via PCR or with restriction enzymes, and we can choose which enzymes we want to do. If we choose linearize by PCR, it will generate our PCR primers for us.
We just have to choose where we want to select our sequence to go in. So I can go into our map, and let's go ahead and put it right here where our GFP sequence is. So we'll replace this little chunk here with our insertion.
Let's select a better chunk here. So we'll replace that by making outward flanking PCR primers, and then we'll generate our fragment, or we'll choose which fragment we want to use, and we'll choose our insertion there. I've just got a very simple sequence here.
And again, I don't want this upstream and downstream stuff, so I'll just select my annotation, and then just this will be amplified and inserted into that sequence. A lot of cool advanced options for if you've got different polymerases or anything like that. And then we can pop over into our product, and this choose overlapping PCR primers is what will actually generate the primers for us.
So in this case, we can set our melting temperature. This is a Gibson homology. We can set the overlapping ends.
We can set any of these other parameters. We can even amplify the vector without our extensions. So when we run this, it will generate our primers for us and show us how to do this in silico cloning.
I always forget to rename this, but we can always rename this, and it'll create a new document that will, again, show all of that history. And one thing for those more advanced users is we can always pop back into this fragment tab, and we can rename what our primers are. So by default, they're just given this fragment forward, fragment reverse, but maybe we would want to change this to DCN or something like that so that we know where these primers are binding.
So we can go ahead and click Assemble, and it will generate our new product. Not a very good cloning operation with some random stop codons, but we can see where all of this was inserted, pop over to our Primers tab to see all of our different primers, and double check that they don't have off-target sites. We could hide them if we wanted to or edit them if we wanted to change the name or change anything about this, maybe make some mutagenesis there as well.
And then we can pop over into my favorite, the History view, where we can see all of the things that happened to generate this one product. So we linearized this with some primers, and then we did our Gibson assembly of this amplified region with our little overlaps. If you're ever having your sequences just synthesized, you're not doing PCR, you're just having them synthesized, it can be helpful to go into this History tab, and you can double click and just generate this sequence that's got our insertion sequence and the overlaps already there for you. So you can use this however you'd like to use, but some more cloning operations there as well.
Perfect, let me check the chat. Any questions about this? Nope. Great, let's pop into a little bit of alignments.
I noticed that there were some questions about alignments, so one of the common things we're going to be doing with Snapgene is mapping Sanger sequences. Again, this is one of those new operations that we've added a little bit more batch functionality or bulk functionality. So you can see here I've got some Sanger sequences and we've got a reference sequence.
So what I can do with this is I can select all of these documents and I'm using my command and shift options to select all of them at once and you can see automatically highlighted is already aligned to reference sequence. We can see what I've got selected, my DNA files and my trace file, and I could always unselect these directly from here if I didn't want to do that. So align to DNA will map all of those Sanger sequences to my reference sequence.
It will choose the correct direction and find where they map to. There are some little interesting ways that we can work with this alignment here. What will automatically be highlighted for you is any mismatches or gaps and so we can hop over to those and they will be highlighted in red and you can see this is probably something that we wanted.
We made a mutagenic primer for that and it is indeed what we were looking for. So maybe we would like these, but if you ever wanted to see the traces we can also click these little arrows here and this will show us a little bit of the metadata about this when this was done quite a while ago now and how many mismatches there were, how many sequences there were, and we can see these are traces as well. And then all of this is editable, so if you didn't think that one of these was a G you could say, you know, I actually think that that's a C, so we can change that around so you can edit directly from within the alignment.
One thing that you may see also is if we scroll to the end of this alignment you'll see that there's this little bar here. Basically, Snapgene does some trimming for you and you can see as we pull this out the quality is getting lower and lower and we're having some weird quality issues, but all of these are set automatically and so I do like to show people this because sometimes the settings can be either a little bit too high or a little bit too low depending on your sequence quality. And so to change that all we need to do is go into aligned sequences here and we go into hide basis.
So I think by default it's on one of these higher ones, but maybe we would want to go down to medium stringency and this will update the endpoints for each of those Sanger sequences. We can open multiple at a time if you wanted to. I'm on kind of a smaller computer so you can't really see them all at once, but that's one way that you can start to look through in batch.
And then a very helpful functionality is we can obviously edit this original document if we wanted to say like correct for a sequencing, not error, but a different mutation that we found in our sequencing. We could edit that original sequence, but there are also ways to do this automatically. And so one thing that we can do is come down to this replace original with aligned and we can either update this file so it will make edits to this file that incorporate these edits to our sequence, or we can make a new file that will replace all of the original sequences with whatever we have of that new file.
So that's one way that you can go quickly through and say hey, I just want my new sequence to be everything that I ended up sequencing so you can do that and generate new files. There's one way you can go a little bit quicker through all of these sequences. You can also hide things or choose how we want to look around here.
Any questions about any of this Sanger sequencing or best practices for confirming sequence alignments? I think in terms of best sequences, it's definitely making sure your different Sanger sequences forward and reverse match. If you trust it, looking at the quality of those reads and then just double checking that everything makes sense. Sometimes we'll have some low quality sequencing and maybe you wouldn't necessarily want to always trust that, but if we've got some agreement across multiple different reads, that's always a good sign.
But use your own judgment when running these different sequencing operations. With Snapgene currently, we can do Sanger sequencing, and if you ever get something like, you know, what's it, plasmidsaurus or something like that, we've got a big long chunk of just DNA, you can align those as well. What we don't have right now is functionality for NGS sequencing or long read sequencing, but again, if that's something that you would like to see, always just let us know.
Perfect. Any questions about alignments or annotations or cloning or anything else that people would like to see? We've got some tools around primer design and primer testing, around agarose gel generation, and around some DNA folding as well. It's one of the more newer things that we've got are some cool ways to look at folding of primers, and this is eventually going to move into CRISPR guide RNA design as well.
Okay, great. Well, if you do have any, if you're working on anything else, let me show you, and I can send an email of this to Jessica as well. We've got, and I actually think you guys have this already, we've got our nice Snapgene Academy that I referenced earlier, that's got information on all of the different ways that we can start to work with these sequences, and again, a lot of the science behind this, so a really helpful way to kind of, you know, we've got some nice little cloning guides and stuff, so we're always trying to make sure all of the science is clear, both in Snapgene and for what people are doing with these actual tools.
So go ahead and check that out if that would be useful for you. Yeah, thanks, I will definitely pass those along. Perfect, thanks, Jessica.
The other thing that we've got is, again, a lot of different, these kind of, not ancillary, but a little bit less commonly used tools, and so people can, we can talk about any of these as well, but I just kind of want to give you a general idea of these are something, some tools that Snapgene has that people don't always necessarily know or use. One thing we can do is we can always, if you select an annotation, we can blast our selected DNA or protein, so if you're ever sending stuff to NCBI to blast, you can just do this directly from within Snapgene. This does just open up a, I'll show you what that looks like, let's go into a sequence.
This does just send that data to NCBI, so that's something to be aware of, so it's not an internal blast, but it will just open up a new little window, and you can blast that. I do like that it has that little name there, so you can remember what you are blasting, actually. So, quick way to kind of start to annotate some of your sequences.
The other thing that we have that is a little bit, not hidden, but people don't always know, is we've got some codon usage tables, so if you're ever doing some cloning operations, and you need to get your codons or your sequence into the correct, you know, codon table for whatever organism you're doing, we've got some options around there as well. So, I can select this sequence, we can see it's already a translated sequence with our amino acids, but I can always go in and we can show our codon usage tables, so that's all of the different tables that we've got, including any imported ones that we have, but we can always go into, this is a little hidden again, features, codons, choose alternative codons. So, I'll pause on that for a second.
So, if you ever did need to codon optimize a sequence, that's kind of the pathway to get to that little option there. And so, for instance, for this gene, I can choose one of my codon frequencies, including a codon frequency for just another gene that I have open. So, let's go ahead and put this into some Arabidopsis, and I can choose to just automatically replace either just those rare codons or replace all non-preferred, so just not the top codon there.
And these little arrows will pop me over to where all of those codons are, and you can see all of the different options. So, my original was one of these rare codon that was at seven percent of our Arabidopsis, so maybe we'd want to pop over and choose this to our preferred. But again, we can just do this automatically, and it will replace all of them.
So, that will then update that file, so important to know that will then change that document with all of those new codons. And again, that will all be reflected in those choose alternative codons. The last thing that I'd like to always talk to people is that we do have a basically an integration with LabArchives.
So, SnapGene is part of the .matx family of brands, also BraphPad Prism, Genius Prime, a lot of different science tools. But one of those is LabArchives, which is a free for academics ELN. So, if you are trying to move off of paper and getting on to an ELN, this is a great one that's got an integration with SnapGene.
And so, we've got some articles on how to set this up, but you basically just go into preferences and into files, and you can log into your LabArchives ELN from within SnapGene. And that is great because then when we come into LabArchives, this is a little bit of what LabArchives looks like. It's basically a very easy to use and very customizable ELN, but it has the ability to actually view SnapGene files just like you would normally view them.
And so, you can really easily migrate from SnapGene into this ELN and create all sorts of cool new sketches and widgets and attachments and stuff. But what I really like is if we go back into SnapGene and say I'm doing some kind of cloning operation, I can always go into file and open my files from LabArchives, and that will actually open up these documents directly from within my lab notebook. So, we'll download that, and this is one of the documents that I've got saved in my lab notebook.
And if I made any edits to this, let's just add more. We can do a little edit to that, so I'm not changing too much. Now, when I go to save this, it will actually save those changes back up to my LabArchives notebook.
So, you can have all of your operations automatically saved or synced basically back up to LabArchives. If you've opened it from LabArchives, or we can also, if we've got a new document like our Codon optimized little insert here, I can always go into file and save to LabArchives and just have this document automatically sent up to LabArchives. So, it's a great way to start to use an ELN alongside Snapgene.
Yeah, thanks, Evan. And I also did drop in the chat, just in case you guys weren't aware, but LabArchives is free for Columbia. And actually, they just did a session yesterday on integrating Prism and Snapgene into LabArchives, so I put the link to that webinar.
Perfect. Thanks, Jessica. Sure thing.
Yeah, great. So, we've got a couple minutes, if anybody has any questions or other topics that they'd like to see about Snapgene or suggestions or anything like that. Yeah, unfortunately, I know some of our folks are in quiet spaces.
Yeah, yeah, everybody's in quiet. Everybody's back in the office, that makes sense. If anybody has any questions, feel free to type them in the chat.
Otherwise, you can always ask our scientists questions. So, we've got dedicated support scientists, all with PhDs who've been working in molecular biology for many years, and they work in close contact with our developers, who are at this point all over the world, who can help make sure if there are bugs or issues, they can help get those fixed as well. Yeah, and I can attest to response time being good for those things, so don't hesitate to just reach out if something occurs to you, and you should get something back in the next day, Max.
Yeah, we try and go as fast, we try and do a 24-hour kind of thing, and again, those suggestions, especially from our community scientists, are always the most important things for us to determine what's going into those next features of Snapgene. That's why we did some of those more batch operations, and why we're going to do a little bit more around sharing and cloud features as well. Well, very nice.
Well, thanks a lot, Evan. I will send you attendees the link to the recording once I post it, and sort of some of the takeaway links, and of course, you can feel free to share that with your colleagues. And yeah, that's it.
Hope everybody has a nice day, and thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for joining, everybody, and thank you, Jessica, for organizing everything. Appreciate it.
Sure thing. All right. Well, goodbye, everybody.
I am Jessica Eaton. I am the person that you may recognize from all the Snapgene mailings, and I sort of help coordinate our Snapgene bulk discount here at Columbia. If you aren't on the Snapgene discount currently, am I still sharing my screen? Yes, I am.
Okay. If you're not on the Snapgene discount currently, it's something you should probably consider. We group everybody together at Columbia to get a discounted license.
Currently, it's about $145 a license versus, I think it's like $350 for a single academic license. So it's a significant savings. And we also do GraphPad Prism, if that's another tool you use.
I'm from Research Computing Services and CUIT, which is a group that really focuses on helping researchers. Along with these softwares, we do other research computing, offer other research computing tools like Globus Data Transfer, HPC, cloud computing stuff. So if you have questions, you can always reach out to Research Computing Services about how to do computing at Columbia.
But as for our agenda today, I just want to check, do you guys still need like an intro to Snapgene? Would you guys appreciate that? Or do you want to sort of dig more into the, you're already like sort of have a good understanding of Snapgene? Maybe we should stick up with the agenda because other people maybe will appreciate it. In the recording, yeah. Oh, I see.
I'll note that I pulled some topics from the people asked for in the registration. And then I, mostly we wanted to also touch on Snapgene 8.0, thank you, which came out in November.
So it has a couple other capabilities as well. So yeah, it looks like I'm going to mostly just turn this over to Dr. Starr. Evan Starr, he's done a couple webinars for us on Snapgene.
He has a PhD from Berkeley in rhizosphere ecology. And he currently works at Snapgene's parent company as a field scientist. So he's very familiar with Snapgene tool.
And so if you have any questions, I will, I know both of you are not great, you can't come off mic, but if you want to drop anything in the chat, I will flag it for Dr. Starr. Okay, I'm going to stop sharing and then turn it over to you, Evan. Perfect.
Thank you, Jessica, and good to see everybody, or good to have everybody on here. Unfortunately, my camera is not working today, but you can Google a picture of me and imagine what I look like as I'm showing you Snapgene. So we can go and follow the agenda, but we can also, if you have any questions, I'll try and keep an eye on that chat, and we can just make sure that we can just cover any questions that come up or whatever would be most useful for everybody.
So as Jessica said, I'm a field application scientist with Snapgene, so I do these webinars, but we can also, you know, I can show you how to learn more about Snapgene on your own or how to contact our support team to help you if there are bugs or nitty-gritty questions that you have or maybe if you have suggestions for how you would like to see the program improved, because that's always something that we're really, you know, we always need is input from the community on, you know, what people would like to see. So we've recently introduced Snapgene 8.0, and what that includes are a lot of more bulk types of functionalities. So if you're familiar with the older versions of Snapgene, it's still very, it's exactly similar, but we can now do some operations on multiple documents all at once.
This is something that was brought to us from the community. Obviously, when you're maybe, say, aligning Sanger sequences to a plasmid, you're not just aligning one or two Sanger sequences. Maybe you want to align a bunch to pick out your best clones, or if you're doing alignments, you don't want to go through and click a bunch of different things.
So we've added some new features for doing a little bit more of these bulk operations, and this is a direction that we'll continue to move into. With the slightly older versions, we've also introduced this little folder viewer here on the left-hand sides. That's kind of a nice way to organize your data and think about it.
So in the very beginning of Snapgene, it was purely a file-based system. So we would go from, you know, Finder or on Windows, you'd just be looking through whichever folders you were most interested in working from. But now we have this concept of kind of a project folder, and so all you need to do is click this little button up here, and you can open up a new folder, and that can be a folder anywhere on your computer or in your shared drive.
So this is a really handy thing to be able to organize your data, and you can see it's still this file-based system. We still have all these same files here and the same folders here as well. It's just kind of a nice way to be able to quickly work within Snapgene.
So that was one of the new features, and I'll show you a couple of these little kind of quick things that we can do as we start getting into the program. There was also a bit of a UI or a user interface update, so we're trying to modernize Snapgene, and we've got some great people who are actually like almost on the psychology side of this for figuring out where people would think that these buttons would go and how they would work. So we're really just trying to make it as intuitive as possible so we can get really deep into the program, but also for people who are brand new or maybe just using this for a class or something like that, we want it to be easy to pick up.
So you'll notice that some of these buttons have moved around a little bit, and that is to try and make this a little bit easier to use. So I think these used to be down here on the bottom, just a minor change just so that all these kind of buttons are in one nice place. There was someone who actually asked about shortcuts or how to do these things, and you'll notice as I'm hovering over, you can see here I'm on a Mac and we've got Command-1 and Command-2.
So one nice way to find shortcuts is to just hover your mouse over any of these buttons and you will find those shortcuts. So we can even do all the, you know, Command-Z. If you're ever wondering about any of them or all of them, we can come up into Help and come down into our keyboard shortcuts, and this will give you a really nice large overview of all of these shortcuts.
I know that our more advanced Snapgene users love these shortcuts and almost don't click anywhere and will just use shortcuts for doing everything that they want. So you can come through here and find all of your favorite ones, or I like this old-fashioned kind of way. You can even print this out if you wanted a printed out version to tape up next to your computer.
So we've got the map view, which is just kind of an overview of our sequence. Obviously, just like before, we can hover over. These are annotations on a plasmid, and we can hover over those to get more information or some of this metadata as well.
We can come into the sequence view, so get really deeper into our DNA or RNA or protein, and look at these sequences here. You'll see on our translated sequences, I'm getting the amino acids being shown here as well, and so that is actually, if we come into Show Features, we can choose what we are able to see. So with this, we also have the Enzymes tab.
I think this hasn't changed very much, and our Features tab, which looks a little different. So Features are basically all of our sequences that we've got on all of our annotations that we've got on our sequence, and this is a nice way where we can start to look through, look at all of our annotations, and again, look at that metadata. And if you're ever working with larger documents, so if you're working with maybe a genome or something like that, and you don't want to go through looking through this map, which could be very large, we can go into this Features and be able to start actually searching for our different, you know, let's find our GFP.
We can find all of our different annotations, and once we select them, we can do a number of things, just like showing them or hiding them or editing them all in bulk. So some ways we can do a little bit more with, you know, documents that maybe have a few more annotations than just your standard plasmid. Again, we've got all of our primers on here, and my absolute favorite view, the History view, if you haven't been using these, try and check it out if you're doing cloning especially.
This is a really handy view to see what has been done to your document, and we'll show you this after I do some cloning steps. But what's really cool about this is this one file here on my computer will keep all of those history changes that I did to this sequence. And so at some point, probably during a demo when I was just messing around with things and showing people how to delete things, I deleted a few bases.
And if I wanted to undo that or maybe resurrect this document, all I need to do is click on this and it will generate a new file without those deleted sequences. And so in this History view, that will have all of those actions that you've done to this individual document, and we can go back to any of those. So especially if we get to more advanced cloning operations, you can see here we can even have branching histories.
So this was actually a vector made by Benjamin Glick, the founder of Snapgene, for some of his work. And so you can see all of the wild history and all of the different types of cloning operations that he did to generate this sequence. So I really like this History view, both in this visual format, or we can also look at it as a text format if you prefer that.
Great. So those are some of the buttons that have maybe moved around a little bit if you're dealing with those. And then these also got a little bit of a refresh, so they might look a little bit different, but they all do the same thing.
Basically, we can choose what enzymes we're seeing on here. So we can click that on to show our enzymes. We can hover over any of those enzymes to see where those cut sites are or what that standard site is.
And some of these will even have some nice little information about them, just in case you're doing a restriction digest and you know it works better in certain conditions. We'll give you a little hint about that. We can also customize which enzymes we're seeing.
So I think by default, it's going to be these unique cutters, so just enzymes that cut once, but we can change this to whatever option that we want. So depending on what you're doing, you can choose whichever set of enzymes you want, or we can come down here at the very bottom and choose what specific enzymes. So we can set up a new list of enzymes.
And this is really handy for if you're doing something like you've got a set of enzymes that are in the freezer or something like that, and you just want to use those. You can set up a new little enzyme list. So basically, come down into this, choose enzymes, move over all those enzymes once, and then you can use those.
Basically, it will be a new little list here. I just made one list for all the unique cutters from one of my other vectors. And so then you can see all of those and where they cut on your sequence.
Perfect. So a little bit about enzymes. Again, there was that question about shortcuts.
You'll see on our enzymes tab, there are shortcuts listed everywhere for how to use all of those different enzymes, or all those different options. We've got some feature options, basically just what annotations we're showing, pretty self-explanatory. We've got our primer options.
So we can choose our hybridization parameters. So basically, when we map primers, we'll set those hybridization parameters. But we can also reset those if you, say, want a little bit more stringent hybridization parameters.
And so then we'd maybe lose some of these primers. But we can turn these on or off, and they'll always appear in this nice purple color. And we can hover over and get that melting temperature, GC content, all of that information.
Our show translations and ORFs is just a little way to show our open reading frames. The other thing that you can do is, if you're ever working with maybe not a plasmid, but a gene of interest that you're working on, and you actually want to see multiple frames. So maybe you're looking at, I don't know, an antibody, and you want to see where your regions are.
We can turn on multiple frames to see all of those amino acids in multiple different frames, including all six frames if you wanted to just go wild. And these will also highlight in green here all of the different open reading frames. This isn't like an advanced algorithm that's looking for open reading frames.
We're just looking for a start codon and a stop codon, basically, and a certain length, I believe. But we can change all of that in these translation options. So I'm just saying, must have a start codon, must be at least 75 amino acids long, and we're looking at standard translation frame.
Great. Show colors is about a little bit of that history of our sequences. So we can turn that on and off.
And then we can also look at alignments. So that's the very basics of working with Snapgene. And I know many of you are already familiar with the program.
Are there any questions about this topic or anything that you guys would like to dive into a little bit more? And feel free to type in the chat. I know not everyone can speak on the microphone. Okay.
We can hop right into a couple of the other things. We talked about annotations. So one thing about Snapgene is we can annotate sequences.
This is now we can do this on multiple documents all at once. So I don't really have a good way to show this, but let's pop open and maybe select a couple of different documents here. So let's say a colleague sent me multiple documents.
So I've got some, you know, maybe just FASTA sequences or anything like that that doesn't have annotations on it already. Or maybe we want to detect new features. One of the new options that we can do is we can select multiple documents at once and go into detect features.
So we can either detect common features. So this is a list of we're in the thousands now of common, you know, features that would be on Plasmid. So GFPs, HIST tags, all those kind of standard cloning options.
And those will be our common features. And so we can annotate all of those annotations on our new sequences now in bulk, starting with Snapgene 8.0. The other option that some people, this is a little bit of a confusing language, but basically you can annotate one sequence from another sequence. So instead of using all of our standard options, you can say, hey, I've got a GenBank file or a .DNA Snapgene file that's got annotations and I've got a new file and I want to annotate those, that new file based on this other file.
That's one way that we can annotate those new sequences based on annotations that we've just got in a file. But most people are just going to use this detect common features option. So this, we can set a threshold for the percent similarity.
We just kind of decided that 96% was the standard, but you can change that however you want. And this will not duplicate our existing features, so we might not really find anything new. But this is a nice way to start to annotate some sequences in bulk, right? When before we would have to go through and click each one, annotate each one, annotate.
So we can come over here into my new document. You can see it didn't find anything on this sequence because there's nothing, there's not this little orange dot where it's lit up and says that there are some unsaved changes. So you can come over here and very handy for us, already highlighted are some of these features that it annotated that weren't on this sequence before.
One thing you may notice is that one new thing that was annotated on here was the cool domain, really odd name that I must have chosen at some point. So one great thing about this annotation, these features, is not only can we come back down and find our detect common features, but if we've got a file downloaded from NCBI, from anything like that, that's got annotations on it, we can also add those to our common features. So this has already been added, but basically what this will do is we can now add this so that any time you run those annotation, either that bulk annotation or from that features and then detect common features, these will be added as custom features that you can automatically just add to your sequence.
So we talked about you can do this one file to another file, or you can add all of those annotations in that file to your big list of common features, and then it will always be annotated on there. If you're ever wondering what features are on there, we can always come up into features and browse our common features, and this will have all of the different features that are included, and you can see what metadata is on here as well. The standard features are just those ones that come built in, but we can also come down into those custom features, and you can see I'm not very good at naming sequences.
I've added a bunch of cool domains and new domains. Basically, any time I've got a sequence, these will now be annotated on there as well. One important trick with this also is to say that it was a CDS or a coding region, and check this little mark here so that it will detect either the exact protein match or an approximate DNA match.
So if you've got a sequence that's got different codons but the same amino acid sequence, it will still annotate that on your sequence. Also, if you're working in a lab group, all of this so far has been on my personal computer, so we're just working with it here, but you probably want to start sharing this with other colleagues. What we can always do is export our features, so we could select all of these, and we can export all of our features so that we can export these features and then bring them in to send them to a colleague who's also using Snapgene, and then they can annotate those exactly how we have.
One thing that we're working on is a little bit of cloud functionality, so what we worked on last time was a little bit of this batch functionality. Next, we're going to be working on a little bit of cloud functionality, so you don't have to email documents or just have things stored on a shared drive. You can set up a little bit of a sharing space that has read-write privileges on it, so you can share that within your lab.
So if you have any thoughts about that or things you would like to see or wouldn't like to see, feel free to bring them up here, or you can always come up into help, ask a question to our scientists, report a bug to our developers, or make a suggestion if there's something that you would like to see, and again, those are always really valuable to us. So any questions about annotations? No, perfect. The cloning operations have not really changed all that much.
We can select our files, but we don't have batch cloning operations quite yet, so that is something that we're also working on. But again, all of our different cloning operations work very similarly. We've got all of those under actions, and what we have is videos for each of these different common cloning operations that you might want to do.
So I really like our videos. These are all on the Snapgene Academy. We also have videos on the actual science behind this, so if you're ever teaching a new grad student or anything like that, these videos will actually show how these different cloning operations work, so you can get a better understanding, not just how to do these operations in Silico, but what they're actually doing.
So that Snapgene Academy is really a useful resource that we've been developing. So if we're going to do some cloning operations, all of this, again, is under actions. We can come into Gibson Assembly and either insert one fragment or insert multiple fragments, and so we can insert a fragment here.
And again, this is just like it would be in the laboratory. So we'll go through the vector, prep the vector, prep our fragment, and generate our product. So it's kind of a step-by-step process.
So if you didn't select already, you can select which vector you want to use from your OpenDNA or other recent documents that you've already used. We can linearize this via PCR or with restriction enzymes, and we can choose which enzymes we want to do. If we choose linearize by PCR, it will generate our PCR primers for us.
We just have to choose where we want to select our sequence to go in. So I can go into our map, and let's go ahead and put it right here where our GFP sequence is. So we'll replace this little chunk here with our insertion.
Let's select a better chunk here. So we'll replace that by making outward flanking PCR primers, and then we'll generate our fragment, or we'll choose which fragment we want to use, and we'll choose our insertion there. I've just got a very simple sequence here.
And again, I don't want this upstream and downstream stuff, so I'll just select my annotation, and then just this will be amplified and inserted into that sequence. A lot of cool advanced options for if you've got different polymerases or anything like that. And then we can pop over into our product, and this choose overlapping PCR primers is what will actually generate the primers for us.
So in this case, we can set our melting temperature. This is a Gibson homology. We can set the overlapping ends.
We can set any of these other parameters. We can even amplify the vector without our extensions. So when we run this, it will generate our primers for us and show us how to do this in silico cloning.
I always forget to rename this, but we can always rename this, and it'll create a new document that will, again, show all of that history. And one thing for those more advanced users is we can always pop back into this fragment tab, and we can rename what our primers are. So by default, they're just given this fragment forward, fragment reverse, but maybe we would want to change this to DCN or something like that so that we know where these primers are binding.
So we can go ahead and click Assemble, and it will generate our new product. Not a very good cloning operation with some random stop codons, but we can see where all of this was inserted, pop over to our Primers tab to see all of our different primers, and double check that they don't have off-target sites. We could hide them if we wanted to or edit them if we wanted to change the name or change anything about this, maybe make some mutagenesis there as well.
And then we can pop over into my favorite, the History view, where we can see all of the things that happened to generate this one product. So we linearized this with some primers, and then we did our Gibson assembly of this amplified region with our little overlaps. If you're ever having your sequences just synthesized, you're not doing PCR, you're just having them synthesized, it can be helpful to go into this History tab, and you can double click and just generate this sequence that's got our insertion sequence and the overlaps already there for you. So you can use this however you'd like to use, but some more cloning operations there as well.
Perfect, let me check the chat. Any questions about this? Nope. Great, let's pop into a little bit of alignments.
I noticed that there were some questions about alignments, so one of the common things we're going to be doing with Snapgene is mapping Sanger sequences. Again, this is one of those new operations that we've added a little bit more batch functionality or bulk functionality. So you can see here I've got some Sanger sequences and we've got a reference sequence.
So what I can do with this is I can select all of these documents and I'm using my command and shift options to select all of them at once and you can see automatically highlighted is already aligned to reference sequence. We can see what I've got selected, my DNA files and my trace file, and I could always unselect these directly from here if I didn't want to do that. So align to DNA will map all of those Sanger sequences to my reference sequence.
It will choose the correct direction and find where they map to. There are some little interesting ways that we can work with this alignment here. What will automatically be highlighted for you is any mismatches or gaps and so we can hop over to those and they will be highlighted in red and you can see this is probably something that we wanted.
We made a mutagenic primer for that and it is indeed what we were looking for. So maybe we would like these, but if you ever wanted to see the traces we can also click these little arrows here and this will show us a little bit of the metadata about this when this was done quite a while ago now and how many mismatches there were, how many sequences there were, and we can see these are traces as well. And then all of this is editable, so if you didn't think that one of these was a G you could say, you know, I actually think that that's a C, so we can change that around so you can edit directly from within the alignment.
One thing that you may see also is if we scroll to the end of this alignment you'll see that there's this little bar here. Basically, Snapgene does some trimming for you and you can see as we pull this out the quality is getting lower and lower and we're having some weird quality issues, but all of these are set automatically and so I do like to show people this because sometimes the settings can be either a little bit too high or a little bit too low depending on your sequence quality. And so to change that all we need to do is go into aligned sequences here and we go into hide basis.
So I think by default it's on one of these higher ones, but maybe we would want to go down to medium stringency and this will update the endpoints for each of those Sanger sequences. We can open multiple at a time if you wanted to. I'm on kind of a smaller computer so you can't really see them all at once, but that's one way that you can start to look through in batch.
And then a very helpful functionality is we can obviously edit this original document if we wanted to say like correct for a sequencing, not error, but a different mutation that we found in our sequencing. We could edit that original sequence, but there are also ways to do this automatically. And so one thing that we can do is come down to this replace original with aligned and we can either update this file so it will make edits to this file that incorporate these edits to our sequence, or we can make a new file that will replace all of the original sequences with whatever we have of that new file.
So that's one way that you can go quickly through and say hey, I just want my new sequence to be everything that I ended up sequencing so you can do that and generate new files. There's one way you can go a little bit quicker through all of these sequences. You can also hide things or choose how we want to look around here.
Any questions about any of this Sanger sequencing or best practices for confirming sequence alignments? I think in terms of best sequences, it's definitely making sure your different Sanger sequences forward and reverse match. If you trust it, looking at the quality of those reads and then just double checking that everything makes sense. Sometimes we'll have some low quality sequencing and maybe you wouldn't necessarily want to always trust that, but if we've got some agreement across multiple different reads, that's always a good sign.
But use your own judgment when running these different sequencing operations. With Snapgene currently, we can do Sanger sequencing, and if you ever get something like, you know, what's it, plasmidsaurus or something like that, we've got a big long chunk of just DNA, you can align those as well. What we don't have right now is functionality for NGS sequencing or long read sequencing, but again, if that's something that you would like to see, always just let us know.
Perfect. Any questions about alignments or annotations or cloning or anything else that people would like to see? We've got some tools around primer design and primer testing, around agarose gel generation, and around some DNA folding as well. It's one of the more newer things that we've got are some cool ways to look at folding of primers, and this is eventually going to move into CRISPR guide RNA design as well.
Okay, great. Well, if you do have any, if you're working on anything else, let me show you, and I can send an email of this to Jessica as well. We've got, and I actually think you guys have this already, we've got our nice Snapgene Academy that I referenced earlier, that's got information on all of the different ways that we can start to work with these sequences, and again, a lot of the science behind this, so a really helpful way to kind of, you know, we've got some nice little cloning guides and stuff, so we're always trying to make sure all of the science is clear, both in Snapgene and for what people are doing with these actual tools.
So go ahead and check that out if that would be useful for you. Yeah, thanks, I will definitely pass those along. Perfect, thanks, Jessica.
The other thing that we've got is, again, a lot of different, these kind of, not ancillary, but a little bit less commonly used tools, and so people can, we can talk about any of these as well, but I just kind of want to give you a general idea of these are something, some tools that Snapgene has that people don't always necessarily know or use. One thing we can do is we can always, if you select an annotation, we can blast our selected DNA or protein, so if you're ever sending stuff to NCBI to blast, you can just do this directly from within Snapgene. This does just open up a, I'll show you what that looks like, let's go into a sequence.
This does just send that data to NCBI, so that's something to be aware of, so it's not an internal blast, but it will just open up a new little window, and you can blast that. I do like that it has that little name there, so you can remember what you are blasting, actually. So, quick way to kind of start to annotate some of your sequences.
The other thing that we have that is a little bit, not hidden, but people don't always know, is we've got some codon usage tables, so if you're ever doing some cloning operations, and you need to get your codons or your sequence into the correct, you know, codon table for whatever organism you're doing, we've got some options around there as well. So, I can select this sequence, we can see it's already a translated sequence with our amino acids, but I can always go in and we can show our codon usage tables, so that's all of the different tables that we've got, including any imported ones that we have, but we can always go into, this is a little hidden again, features, codons, choose alternative codons. So, I'll pause on that for a second.
So, if you ever did need to codon optimize a sequence, that's kind of the pathway to get to that little option there. And so, for instance, for this gene, I can choose one of my codon frequencies, including a codon frequency for just another gene that I have open. So, let's go ahead and put this into some Arabidopsis, and I can choose to just automatically replace either just those rare codons or replace all non-preferred, so just not the top codon there.
And these little arrows will pop me over to where all of those codons are, and you can see all of the different options. So, my original was one of these rare codon that was at seven percent of our Arabidopsis, so maybe we'd want to pop over and choose this to our preferred. But again, we can just do this automatically, and it will replace all of them.
So, that will then update that file, so important to know that will then change that document with all of those new codons. And again, that will all be reflected in those choose alternative codons. The last thing that I'd like to always talk to people is that we do have a basically an integration with LabArchives.
So, SnapGene is part of the .matx family of brands, also BraphPad Prism, Genius Prime, a lot of different science tools. But one of those is LabArchives, which is a free for academics ELN. So, if you are trying to move off of paper and getting on to an ELN, this is a great one that's got an integration with SnapGene.
And so, we've got some articles on how to set this up, but you basically just go into preferences and into files, and you can log into your LabArchives ELN from within SnapGene. And that is great because then when we come into LabArchives, this is a little bit of what LabArchives looks like. It's basically a very easy to use and very customizable ELN, but it has the ability to actually view SnapGene files just like you would normally view them.
And so, you can really easily migrate from SnapGene into this ELN and create all sorts of cool new sketches and widgets and attachments and stuff. But what I really like is if we go back into SnapGene and say I'm doing some kind of cloning operation, I can always go into file and open my files from LabArchives, and that will actually open up these documents directly from within my lab notebook. So, we'll download that, and this is one of the documents that I've got saved in my lab notebook.
And if I made any edits to this, let's just add more. We can do a little edit to that, so I'm not changing too much. Now, when I go to save this, it will actually save those changes back up to my LabArchives notebook.
So, you can have all of your operations automatically saved or synced basically back up to LabArchives. If you've opened it from LabArchives, or we can also, if we've got a new document like our Codon optimized little insert here, I can always go into file and save to LabArchives and just have this document automatically sent up to LabArchives. So, it's a great way to start to use an ELN alongside Snapgene.
Yeah, thanks, Evan. And I also did drop in the chat, just in case you guys weren't aware, but LabArchives is free for Columbia. And actually, they just did a session yesterday on integrating Prism and Snapgene into LabArchives, so I put the link to that webinar.
Perfect. Thanks, Jessica. Sure thing.
Yeah, great. So, we've got a couple minutes, if anybody has any questions or other topics that they'd like to see about Snapgene or suggestions or anything like that. Yeah, unfortunately, I know some of our folks are in quiet spaces.
Yeah, yeah, everybody's in quiet. Everybody's back in the office, that makes sense. If anybody has any questions, feel free to type them in the chat.
Otherwise, you can always ask our scientists questions. So, we've got dedicated support scientists, all with PhDs who've been working in molecular biology for many years, and they work in close contact with our developers, who are at this point all over the world, who can help make sure if there are bugs or issues, they can help get those fixed as well. Yeah, and I can attest to response time being good for those things, so don't hesitate to just reach out if something occurs to you, and you should get something back in the next day, Max.
Yeah, we try and go as fast, we try and do a 24-hour kind of thing, and again, those suggestions, especially from our community scientists, are always the most important things for us to determine what's going into those next features of Snapgene. That's why we did some of those more batch operations, and why we're going to do a little bit more around sharing and cloud features as well. Well, very nice.
Well, thanks a lot, Evan. I will send you attendees the link to the recording once I post it, and sort of some of the takeaway links, and of course, you can feel free to share that with your colleagues. And yeah, that's it.
Hope everybody has a nice day, and thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for joining, everybody, and thank you, Jessica, for organizing everything. Appreciate it.
Sure thing. All right. Well, goodbye, everybody.