It’s that time of year again. The mornings are chilly, the leaves are falling, and ASHG is right around the corner. This year will mark my very first ASHG and I am really looking forward to meeting some of the Golden Helix community!

The team has been hard at work preparing for a great conference and I wanted to give you an update with specifics on the Golden Helix events that you won’t want to miss.

First, you will find us in booth 422.

Second, VarSeq! Our entire team has been very hard at work bringing VarSeq to the community and will present our first ASHG demonstration at 12:30 pm on Sunday. (Please note: this time has changed from Andreas Scherer’s previous post Looking forward to ASHG). This VarSeq demo will demonstrate the speed and ease with which VarSeq handles both variant discovery and gene panels. We will also be giving away some sweet VarSeq t-shirts after the demo, so you will want to stick around.

Third, the t-shirts! As most of you reading this already know, we had a t-shirt design contest this summer and will be unveiling the winning designs at ASHG. So, how do you get them? We will be hosting a series of in-booth demonstrations showcasing VarSeq, SVS, and GenomeBrowse during the conference and some of those will include a t-shirt give-away. Here is the schedule – bold times* indicate a t-shirt give-away:

Sunday, October 19^th

• 11:30 am – GenomeBrowse: Curating Your Own Reference Sequence and Gene Track
• 12:30 pm* – Introducing VarSeq: Variant Discovery & Gene Panels Made Easy
• 4:00 pm* – SVS: Mixed Model KBAC – Rare Variant Collapsing with Structure Correction
• 5:30 pm – SVS: Using IBS and PCA to look at Cryptic Relatedness and Population Structure

Monday, October 20^th

• 11:00 am* – SVS: Genome Wide Association Study Correcting for Population Stratification
• 1:30 pm – GenomeBrowse: Using Evernote to Share Publication Quality Plots and Notes
• 2:30 pm* – VarSeq: Exome Trio Analysis Made Easy
• 3: 30 pm – SVS: Runs of Homozygosity with Support for NGS Variants

Tuesday, October 21^st

• 11:00 am – GenomeBrowse: Curating Your Own Reference Sequence and Gene Track
• 1:00 pm* – SVS: Mixed Model KBAC – Rare Variant Collapsing with Structure Correction
• 2:30 pm* – VarSeq: Gene Panel Testing Annotation and Interpretation Made Easy
• 3:30 pm – SVS: Using IBS and PCA to look at Cryptic Relatedness and Population Structure

Last, but definitely not least, is Greta Linse Peterson’s platform talk. Greta, our Director of Product Management and Quality and her team recently developed and implemented the new MM-KBAC method into SVS. Greta will present on this new method at 6:15 pm on Monday, the 20th in room 20A in the Statistical Methods for Population Based Studies session. 

During the conference we will keep you updated on these events via Facebook and Twitter, so be sure to follow us if you would like a reminder.

And with that, I look forward to seeing some of you soon in sunny San Diego. Safe travels!