Interactive tools

Plasmid Map Renderer: free, no-login plasmid map maker

37degrees Team
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Plasmid Map Renderer: free, no-login plasmid map maker

Free, no-login plasmid maps

SnapGene Viewer is free, but every map it shows is locked inside the app — no SVG export, no embed, no “open in a browser tab and share the link.” Meanwhile, gene-synthesis costs keep falling and every wet-lab project ends up touching dozens of constructs a year. So we built a small tool that does one job well: take a GenBank record, give back a publication-quality map you can drop into a figure or a slide.

Use it now

Found a bug or want a feature? Tell us — we read everything.

What it does

  • Inputs: .gb, .gbk, or raw GenBank text pasted into the box. Up to 100 kb per record.
  • Topology: circular (the default — what you want for a plasmid) or linear (better for long inserts and PCR amplicons).
  • Output: SVG, downloadable with one click. Vector graphics, infinite zoom, drops cleanly into Illustrator, Inkscape, Figma, Keynote, or PowerPoint.

Common features are colored automatically: CDS in brand pink, promoters in green, origins in slate, primer-binding sites in light grey. Labels are pulled from the GenBank /label, /gene, or /product qualifier in that order.

How it works

  • Biopython parses the GenBank record and pulls out the features.
  • DNA Features Viewer (MIT-licensed, from the Edinburgh Genome Foundry) lays out the features and emits the SVG.

Both run on our hosted backend; the widget you see above is a thin vanilla-JS embed that POSTs your GenBank text to our service and renders the SVG it gets back.

Embed it on your site

Three tags, no build step, no framework:

<link
  rel="stylesheet"
  href="https://www.37degrees.io/interactive-tools/plasmid-map-renderer/styles.css"
/>

<div id="plasmid-widget-embed"></div>

<script>
  window.PLASMID_API_ENDPOINT =
    "https://dd7e4gsiki.execute-api.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/plasmid";
  window.PLASMID_THEME = "light"; // or "dark"
</script>
<script src="https://www.37degrees.io/interactive-tools/plasmid-map-renderer/widget.js"></script>

That’s it. Drop it into a lab wiki, a method paper’s supplementary site, or your group’s homepage. No login, no tracking, no API key.

Credit

If you publish a figure made with this tool, please cite the DNA Features Viewer paper:

Zulkower, V. and Rosser, S. (2020). DNA Features Viewer: a sequence annotation formatting and plotting library for Python. Bioinformatics 36(15), 4350–4352. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa213

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