Trick for making diagram of gene for paper figure? - (Jul/26/2012 )

Is there an easy program or trick to making "professional looking" figures showing your knockout mouse gene and insert (or gene trap mouse in this case) etc...? I'm putting one together from scratch as a vector image right now though it would be great if there were some kind of shortcut . I know you've all seen them before but I included one here just in case from some random paper. Do you usually do a vector or raster image? Do you just copy some previous images from your lab and change the labels or make it from scratch?

Thanks.







http://mcb.asm.org/content/28/22/6819/F2.expansion?ck=nck

I would make them myself, probably a vector image due to the ease of scalability and manipulation.

You forgot to include the image, but I am presuming you are meaing the ones with genes represented by boxes and maybe a few arrows showing deletion events.

The best one is adobe illustrator. Powerpoint can also do. If you need to draw gene structure, you can to go UCSC to find the gene in genome browser, export the graph as pdf, open the PDF in illustrator to make necessary changes.

You can do this for any vector image editor - I use inkscape (freeware) personally.

i second illustrator.