Category Archives: Uncategorized

Variant Interpretation with VSClinical: RET-KIF5b Gene Fusion

         September 24, 2019

Gene Fusion Background Gene fusions are hybrid genes that result from translocations, interstitial deletions, or chromosomal inversions that can lead to constitutive gene activation and result in increased or abnormal protein production. Increased or abnormal protein production subsequently can play an important role in tumorigenesis and thus identifying and evaluating this type of biomarker is important in the cancer workspace…. Read more »

Updated Annotations: The new and improved gnomAD 2.1.1

         September 19, 2019

The Broad Institute team led by Dan MacArthur announced the release of gnomAD version 2.1 at last year’s ASHG conference. This new version boasted data from 125,748 exomes and 15,708 genomes, but the greater updates were the improved QC refinement and more discrete sub-population break downs. Although the majority of samples were counted in the previous 2.0.2 release, the additional… Read more »

Automating & Standardizing Your NGS Workflow

         July 30, 2019

As our regular customers may know, we write our blogs to provide relevant content to any NGS-based analysis with VarSeq. Our goal here at Golden Helix is to provide top quality software and guidance on how to use the software efficiently to perform variant analysis. However, this blog series will take a more general perspective and supply some insight into… Read more »

Optimizing your CNV Analysis in VSWarehouse

         October 16, 2018
VSWarehouse Updates

We recently hosted a webcast covering the value and application of VSWarehouse through VarSeq. Not only is VSWarehouse a solution for storing your NGS data in a central repository, but it also provides a means to enhance the tertiary analysis done in VarSeq. VSWarehouse will store all your sample/variant data but also stores your catalogs of pathogenic variants, clinical reports, and has the capability of filtering/querying on all your stored data quickly. In addition,… Read more »

Using the GRCh38 reference assembly for clinical interpretation in VSClinical: Webcast Q&A

         September 27, 2018

This webcast generated some great questions! If you have any other questions for me that are not answered below, please feel free to ask those by emailing support@goldenhelix.com. Does VSClinical come with support for the new reference genome? Yes! We worked hard to make everything work in VSClinical regardless of your choice of reference genomes. The only caveat is that… Read more »

Annotation Education Series: Cancer Annotations

         October 5, 2017

CIViC The Clinical Interpretations of Variants in Cancer, better known as CIViC, is an open access open source, community-driven web resource available to all VarSeq users. Nature Genetics published an article that states, “CIViC accepts public knowledge contributions but requires that experts review these submissions”. Fundamentally, the focus behind CIViC is to make sure the variants contained in the database… Read more »

Golden Helix, Inc. – Your Annotation Curation Station

         June 15, 2017

The current reduced cost and increase availability of genome sequencing has been making academics, clinicians and individuals alike excited with the possibility of increased research depth, diagnosing capability and personal curiosity. And although a freshly sequenced genome is chock-full of tasty letter snippets, the real revelation and education occurs when comparing to an annotation foundation. In this post, I’ll review… Read more »

Utilizing VSReports in Your Clinical Workflow

         January 12, 2017

Clinical labs need to be able to process samples down to a short list of variants and publish a professional report. VSReports helps scientists and clinicians alike create timely, actionable reports that can improve clinical decision making and streamline patient care by seamlessly incorporating the results of tertiary analysis into a customizable clinical report. To include the VSReports functionality in… Read more »

End of Year Pricing is Here!

         November 11, 2016
Pricing

This year we have added some very important features to our software including CNV calling in VarSeq and integrating our premium annotations into SVS. We have also made many improvements to our software’s performance so that you can handle growing datasets with relative ease. In an effort to thank our community for their support throughout the year, we are happy… Read more »

Agrigenomics 2.0 Webcast

         October 27, 2016
genetic variants

This month’s webcast, Agrigenomics 2.0 – Advanced Analysis to Accelerate Discovery, will feature two well known Agrigenomic researchers and long-time Golden Helix customers, Christopher Seabury of Texas A&M and Holly Neiburgs of Washington State University. These two will join our own Gabe Rudy for a look at advanced workflows in SVS to advance mammalian genetic research. We hope you can join us! Wednesday,… Read more »

Upcoming Webcast on CNV Calling of Target Regions

         September 27, 2016
CNV calling

Copy Number Variations (CNVs) play an important role in human health and disease, and the detection of CNVs in clinical samples has the potential to improve clinical diagnoses and inform treatment decisions. Yet until now, if you wanted to have CNVs on your targeted gene samples, you would need an alternative assay such as Chromosomal Microarrays (CMAs). In this webcast,… Read more »

Let There Be Genomes: Big Data Genomics Webcast Teaser

         September 15, 2016
Big Data Genomics

Big data is here, but fear not, you don’t need a Hadoop cluster to analyze your genomes or your cohorts of tens of thousands of samples! It turns out, for the kind of algorithms employed in variant annotation and filtering, running optimized local programs is often faster anyway. As we support our diverse customer base, we have definitely seen the… Read more »

Guest Webcast by Dr. Rohan Palmer

         August 4, 2016

Dr. Rohan Palmer presents: Investigating Shared Additive Genetic Variation for Alcohol Dependence Wednesday, August 10th @ 12pm EDT Abstract: Molecular genetic research has supported the use of a multivariate phenotype representing alcohol dependence in studies of genetic association. One recent study found that additive genetic effects on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder version four (DSM-IV) alcohol dependence criteria overlap,… Read more »

Recent Customer Publications

         July 28, 2016
published

It’s that time of the month again! As usual, we have several new customer publications we would like to recognize and share with you. Please check out a few of our favorite articles: In Biological Psychiatry, Ariel Martinez and Marucio Arcos-Burgos of the National Institute of Health, as well as colleagues, published An Ultraconserved Brain-specific Enhancer within ADGRL3 (LPHN3) Underpins… Read more »

Precision Medicine leverages innovative tech advances

         July 26, 2016

We are excited to announce that earlier this month an article by our CEO, Dr. Andreas Scherer, was featured in Chronicle Pharmabiz. The article is focused on how Precision Medicine is becoming a reality by leveraging the advances in technology. The excerpt below is courtesy of Chronicle Pharmabiz. Almost 2,500 years ago, Hippocrates captured one of the key principles underlying… Read more »

Custom Filtering using ClinVar Annotations

         July 19, 2016
ClinVar

ClinVar is one of our most used annotations sources for a variety of workflows. It is also the public annotation source that is updated most frequently of all the sources currently supported in VarSeq. ClinVar provides new versions of their database once a month in several formats (XML, VCF, TXT). We use custom Python scripts to convert the provided VCF… Read more »

Finding Rare Mutations at the Center for Rare Jewish Genetic Disorders

         July 14, 2016
Bonei Olam

Since 1999, Bonei Olam has been providing large-scale funding for fertility treatment and research. The non-profit’s mission is to provide whatever means or resources necessary to help childless couples achieve the dream of parenthood. Today, it is recognized in the worldwide medical arena for its leadership role at the forefront of reproductive medicine, research and technology. Specifically, Bonei Olam has… Read more »

Whole Exome Sequencing workflows in VarSeq

         June 14, 2016
Whole Exome Sequencing Workflows

Whole exome sequencing workflows using SNP & Variation Suite (SVS) was presented in a recent webcast, by Dr. Robert Hamilton from the Hospital for Sick Kids. In particular, he performed some filtering on his data to look for only heterozygous variants in his sample of interest, removed variants with allele frequency less than 0.005% based off of the ExAC Variant Frequency… Read more »

Diagnosing Rare Disease at King Abdulaziz Medical City

         June 9, 2016
King Abdulaziz Medical City

King Abdulaziz Medical City (KAMC) in Riyadh commenced its operations in May 1983. Since then, it has continued expanding, while providing services for a rapidly growing patient population in all of its catchments areas. Today, King Fahad National Guard Hospital has evolved to be part of the King Abdulaziz Medical City with many other prominent medical centers. Since its inauguration… Read more »

Recent Customer Publications

         April 5, 2016
Recent Customer Publications

Recent Customer Publications Recently we announced that our customers named the Golden Helix software in 1,000 published articles! It was quite an honor for us and we are excited to start working toward 2,000. To start us off, here are a few of our recent customer publications. Fielding Hejtmancik and his colleagues at the NEI published, Polymorphism rs7278468 is associated with… Read more »