Copying Sequences

This section of the quick tour shows how to copy entire sequences or parts of sequences to the clipboard, for example to later paste them into web forms for database comparisons.

Copying Entire Sequences

To copy an entire sequence:

• Go to the project view
• Select the sample (or, if you want to copy a consenus sequence for a contig, the contig)
• Choose "Copy (selected sequence)" from the "Edit" menu, or use the keyboard shortcuts (Command-C on OS X, Control-C on Windows).

This will copy the entire sequence for the sample or contig, but without any gap characters.

You can paste the sequence into other applications like word processors or web browsers. For example, use the NCBI BLAST server to check on a sequence in our example project:

• Open the "Example1" project
• Select and copy the sequence for the sample "A060.s"
• Open a web browser page and go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/Blast.cgi.
• Paste the sequence into the "Search" textbox, and then press the "BLAST" button.

Once BLAST is done, you will find out where our demo sequence is from.

Copying Selections

You can also copy parts of sequences rather than entire sequences. This works from base view, trace view, and contig view windows. To try this:

• Select the sequence "A060.s" in the project "Example1" in the project window
• Go to the "View" menu, and select "Bases"
• In the base view that opens, select a number of bases by dragging with the mouse (or by shift-clicking)
• Press the "Copy" keyboard shortcut (Command-C on OS X, Control-C on Windows)
• Switch to a different application (for example a text editor or the web browser with the NCBI BLAST server page), and paste the sequence you just copied (use the Command-V resp. Control-V keyboard shortcuts)

If you have a base view, trace view, or contig view open and want to copy the entire sequence, simply choose "Select All" from the "Edit" menu before copying (or use the keyboard shortcut Command-A respectively Control-A).

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