Notice (2014-09-17)

This version of Protospacer has been updated to include the Doench-Root Activity score. All databases created prior to this date will be incompatible with this and future versions of Protospacer.

Development version

Protospacer is developed and maintained on Mac OS X. For practical reasons, the Mac OS X version will be the most up-to-date and bug free version for the forseable future. Please let us know if you find something wrong with the Windows version.

Installation

1. Protospacer will only run on 64bit operating systems, please make sure that your system is compliant.
2. Doable-click the Protospacer.Mac64.tar.gz file to unpack its contents in a directory where you have read/write privileges, i.e. any directory within your home directory.
3. Step 2. will create a folder named "Protospacer", it will contain three sub-folders, the main Protospacer executable, and the Protospacer Database Creator (PDC) executable.
4. Complete the instructions for running Protospacer for the first time (You can find these here, http://www.protospacer.com/documentation.html).

Download and install pre-made databases

1. Download any of the prebuilt genome archives from https://sourceforge.net/projects/protospacer/files/Databases/.
2. Copy or move the archive to the "Data" folder in the Protospacer directory.
3. Unpack the contents of the prebuilt archive by double-clicking on it (OS X), or by right-clicking and selecting the appropriate option (Windows). If Windows doesn't allow you to unpack for some reason, then need to use a utility like 7zip, http://www.7-zip.org/,which I recommended to Win users in general.
4. Open Protospacer. The database should now be listed in the "Available databases" box.
5. Load the database by double-clicking on it and get started.