Timeline for “classic” and modern applications

The following timeline shows the release dates of the “classic” Lasergene applications and their modern counterparts:

• 1988 – EditSeq was DNASTAR’s original application for creating and editing sequences and their features.

• 1993 – PrimerSelect was DNASTAR’s original application for primer design and primer catalog creation, while MegAlign offered pairwise and multiple sequence alignment and the creation of phylogenetic trees.

• 2001 – With increasing popularity of the Internet, PrimerSelect, MegAlign and EditSeq were upgraded to allow searching of NCBI’s BLAST and Entrez databases.

• 2005 – SeqBuilder was added to the Lasergene software offering for virtual cloning, PCR primer design, plasmid map creation, and sequence editing.

• 2013 – MegAlign Pro was released with Lasergene 11 for multiple sequence alignments and visualization.

• 2017 – SeqBuilder Pro was released with Lasergene 15 and SeqBuilder was retired. SeqBuilder Pro featured a beautiful new interface and supported additional cloning methods and agarose gel simulation. To smooth the transition from EditSeq and PrimerSelect, SeqBuilder Pro introduced a button that users could press to make the interface resemble their favorite classic applications.

• 2018 – Pairwise alignment functionality was added to MegAlign Pro.

• 2019 – With the release of Lasergene 16, EditSeq, PrimerSelect and MegAlign were retired.

• 2020 – With the release of Lasergene 17, SeqMan Ultra was introduced as a replacement for SeqMan Pro.

• 2024 – With the release of Lasergene 18, SeqMan Pro is still included, but will be removed in the near future.