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"Students and professionals no longer need to labor over handwritten notes to describe complex plasmid designs... GCK [has] features that allow rapid production of professional-quality presentations.
"GCK supplies a user-friendly and affordable graphic interface to manipulate complex plasmids and produce professional color illustrations.... GCK is an especially good choice for labs with students because it is an easy-to-learn program that documents each step of plasmid constrution. This program would be an excellent addition to any molecular biology lab."
"Pretty Plasmids" - REVIEW, Shanks, O.C., Bissonette, L., and Ream, W., Science 289:413a (2000)
"Our molecular biologists have relied upon Gene Construction Kit for more than a decade. The ease of use, the key features, and Textco's world-class support have created a level of devotion to a software package rarely seen among scientists. Highly recommended!"
Joseph C. Cerro, Head of Informatics, Bayer Pharmaceutical Corporation
"GCK is Awesome"
Paul Stabach, Yale University, Pathology
"In my opinion the annotated sequence of a plasmid is far more useful and important than simply the plasmid map. And I'm not aware of any other plasmid map program that has the extensive and flexible annotation capabilities of Gene Construction Kit. For my work in designing proteins and plasmids, GCK is an essential tool."
- Dan Allison, VLST corporation
"I have been using GCK since 1991. At that time, I was absolutely amazed at the capabilities of the program to assist in drawing plasmids. However, it became clear very quickly that this was more than a drawing program. The ability to switch between "graphic" and "sequence" forms of DNA is a great idea and extremely helpful in designing cloning experiments as well as preparing figures for presentations, posters and in some cases, publication. GCK has tremendous capabilities, but many of these are not obvious upon first use.... The nice touches like "seeing" graphics of DNA restriction digestions on gels as well as tables of the various digestion products is a very nice teaching tool when used in conjunction with a wet lab!"
"...I am always surprised to find that [GCK] does things that I had not even thought of before."
"Finally, support for GCK is outstanding. I have received updates, FREE of CHARGE, to the original program that I purchased. In addition, whenever I had a problem or question, the answers were forthcoming very quickly, by phone and by Email. I believe that customer service and support is as important as a good program.... GCK is a great program with great customer support! In fact, from a customer satisfaction point of view, GCK is the best software purchase I have ever made."
E.C., Queen's University, Canada
"Ok, I finally realize that I should have gotten the gene construction kit File Search feature right from the start! Now we have all of our constructs and primers on a server that we can search and it has been a tremendous help. That single feature has lifted us from the darkness of dreary searches through freezers and notebooks to a new realm of organized experimentation. THANK YOU!"
"Sign me up for GCK! I have been evangelizing the original GCK for years! TOO many times have I had to struggle with the herculean task of reconstructing the REAL sequence of our in-house, Nth-generation vectors.
"Before GCK, gene jockeys like myself often "relied" on human memory, incomplete plasmid construction notes, and scrawled-on vector maps to trace the lineage of a heavily recombined plasmid... hoping that I had not missed anything. Then, I'd slave for days on a computer with high-priced, text-based sequence editors to laboriously piece together the construction history of those plasmids, hoping that the final sequence would be the right one. God! What a frustration!
"Then GCK came out, and I grabbed it like a drowning man grabs a lifering. Because GCK "thinks" the way humans do... visually! I could now generate a high-quality, detailed flowchart of my plasmids' construction, showing all the fragments involved and their relative sizes, with arrows, text labels, site markers on-screen.
"Big deal, you might say. But wait! Thanks to GCK's visual approach, these graphic representations are not just pretty pieces of art for publication. No! They represent REAL sequence data!
"Cut-and-paste a segment from one vector to another (representing a restriction-ligation reaction), and the actual sequence data (plus any site markers, comments, or other sequence annotations previously made) goes with it. My favorite demo for the unbeliever is to assemble a multi-step plasmid from multiple source vectors or fragments... all without ever looking at the base sequence. (Of course, I can easily inspect and annotate the actual base sequence at any time).
"With the new upgrade to GCK, one can now do complex sequence analyses/queries such as finding ORFs, fingering candidate restriction sites of given frequency and/or location, or identifying silent mutation candidates in ORFs for adding/removing new sites. ...GCK does it all under one roof. A must-have for new users and veterans alike."
J.D., University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
"I think as much as the first release was and still is a fantastic cloning and documentation tool, GCK takes it one step further. There is no other tool that accomplishes these tasks with such a clean interface. The new features further enhance GCK's utility as the premier tool for desktop cloning."
W.H., Computational Scientist
"I am a convinced GCK user. Your program is indeed so valuable that I am still amazed to see fellows researchers still using what actually accounts more or less to drawing applications to (try) to keep order in their constructs. I guess GCK is not perfect, since nothing is ever perfect, but I will have to think a bit to find what could be improved."
"I have always felt that the first version of Gene Construction Kit was the best piece of Macintosh software on the market and without a doubt the best scientific software ever designed. GCK takes that to the next level by being even better.... I have also found Textco the company to be one of the best software companies when it comes to deal with them over support and technical problems with their products."
L.V., Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham
"In my opinion, GCK1 is the best plasmid drawing program available. The changes that I had wished for such as one aa display, frame boxing, etc. were all included in GCK. GCK is a great program that will be useful for anyone who needs to illustrate their constructs as well as for publication quality illustrations."
"GCK was fantastic, best DNA program I have ever used. It was user-friendly, had a ton of useful features, and most important it saved me hours of tedious inefficient manual DNA sequence work."
T.R., University of Vermont
"GCK is the only product available which perfectly suits the gene engineers need for a unified cloning analysis and documentation software. This program is especially valuable for all people who have to organize lots of related plasmid constructs, plasmid families etc. In particular, the feature to connect unlimited text information to any piece of the sequence really facilitates every step from planning of new constructs to the paper preparation. GCK makes it easy to follow the history of every single nucleotide of the construct, since you may add e.g. the original reference, where you got it from, mutations etc. directly in the sequence, one click away."
S.D., University of Heidelberg
"I liked the program very much, I found it easy to use, there are many features included, for example, the possibility to run gels on the computer (a big help to explain to technicians), draw detailed plasmid maps and so many more. I am still discovering new features. It is certainly my preferred computer program for molecular biology.
"Although I was chosen as a beta tester to _find_ bugs, I could detect only two or three in early stages of program development. I could not find any bugs even when heavily testing the last three betas. For me, that is another proof for the high quality of the program."
P.K., University of Freiburg
"GCK is the best AND the only program for [desktop cloning] purpose. I and most of my students have been using GCK for ... years. I have been looking at other programs over the years but never one of them came near to GCK! Everybody around me loves it..."
J.-C. I, Centre Medical Universitaire, Switzerland
"...the Gene Construction Kit is an essential tool for the molecular biologist. I plan all of my cloning projects with it."
K.F., USDA/UC Berkeley Plant Gene Expression Center
"...this is the best genetic manipulation tool I have ever had the opportunity to work with.
"... It seems to have something for everybody that improved it over the original. I especially like the ORF finder and the ability to selectively find R.E. sites. Somebody else uses the silent mutation feature all the time. You and the people that you work with should be very proud of the new version.
"I can't think of another piece of software that I use as much or as completely as GCK.
"... I didn't think that you'd be able to do much to improve [GCK] but you did one hell of a job. It always was the best plasmid program on the market and now its even better."
K.S., University of Calgary
"GCK is the software I have been looking for. It is simple and powerful, and easy to use."
T.S., Kyoto Prefectural University
"It's encouraging to see such a great product... The ease of use of your application combined with its powerful capabilities makes it a must for the desktop."
"Fantastic Software. It makes life much easier"
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