Author Archives: Darby Kammeraad

About Darby Kammeraad

Darby Kammeraad is the Director of Field Application Services at Golden Helix, joining the team in April of 2017. Darby graduated in 2016 with a master’s degree in Plant Sciences from Montana State University, where he also received his bachelor’s degree in Plant Biotechnology. Darby works on customer support and training. When not in the office, Darby is learning how to play guitar, hunting, fishing, snowboarding, traveling or working on a new recipe in the kitchen.

Top-Quality GWAS Analysis: Part IV

         January 24, 2019

Population Stratification This article is going to cover how to factor for population stratification in your association test to continue our blog series on top quality GWAS analysis (additional articles for this series are located at the bottom of this blog). Quality control steps up to this point have included assessing sample and marker statistics, LD pruning on markers, and… Read more »

GRCh38 Liftover: Ensuring Top Quality Variant Analysis

         November 27, 2018
annotate

In a recent webcast, our VP of Product and Engineering Gabe Rudy gave us insight into the current capability and benefits to lifting over to the GRCh38 assembly. Golden Helix fully supports this transition into the most recent reference assembly and have developed our tools on both the 38 and 37 fronts. The purpose of this blog is to not… Read more »

Accessing your VSWarehouse Browser

         October 23, 2018
VSWarehouse Updates

In the first two parts of this blog, we presented examples of how to leverage Warehouse-stored VSClinical and CNV assessment catalogs in the VarSeq project. Now we are going to explore the Warehouse interface a bit more and show how to query on stored variant data. To access Warehouse from VarSeq, click the V Connect icon located in the top… Read more »

VSClinical and VSWarehouse – Leveraging Consistent Clinical Interpretations

         October 22, 2018
VSWarehouse Updates

Part 1 of this blog series was focused on new capabilities in Warehouse to store your CNV results. We explored some approaches of how to utilize assessment catalogs of cohort and known pathogenic events. What makes Warehouse so useful in this application is that the catalog is accessed from one central location and ensures every user is leveraging the same… 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 »

Storing your Copy Number Variant & ACMG Results in VSWarehouse – Webcast Q&A

         October 11, 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. To what level does the Warehouse scale? We have tested multiple instances of Warehouse in-house and on the cloud and it scales incredibly well to tens of thousands of samples and 100s… Read more »

Getting Started Guide for Sentieon – Part II

         September 25, 2018
Sentieon

Creating Custom Scripts The first part of the Getting Started Guide for Sentieon described the steps for downloading the Sentieon tools, acquiring a license file, and running the example script/pipeline to generate the VCF and BAM files. This blog will cover some custom script changes users can make to add more efficiency when running through multiple samples at once. We… Read more »

Getting Started Guide for Sentieon

         September 21, 2018
Sentieon

Sentieon; your swift secondary analysis solution. Golden Helix’s software solutions present a reputable and top-quality analysis of your NGS data. Looking at this process from a 30,000 ft view, the annotation and filtering of variants in your vcf files and discovery of CNVs based coverage data in the bam file make up the tertiary level portion of the analysis. However,… Read more »

Processing Hereditary Cancer Panels in VarSeq: Webcast Q&A

         August 16, 2018

Our “Processing Hereditary Cancer Panels in VarSeq” webcast was a great lesson for viewers to learn more about the functionality of our software. If you didn’t have a chance to join us for the live event, you can watch the recording on our site here. Q: What is the best place to get clinical interpretations of breast cancer variant interpretations?… Read more »

CNV Setup & Quality Assessment: Part 1

         July 26, 2018
annotate

2017 was a busy year regarding the development of our CNV tools. Since the release of the CNV caller, we have produced quite a bit of content tailored to assist our users with getting started. Here are some links: Robarts Research Institute CNV analysis on patients with familial hypercholesterolemia CNV annotations Common CNV questions CNV calling with shallow whole genome… Read more »

Using NGS to detect CNVs in familial hypercholesterolemia Q&A

         February 19, 2018

First-place Abstract Competition Winner, Michael Iacocca, shared his research with the Golden Helix Community during our February webcast ‘Using NGS to detect CNVs in familial hypercholesterolemia‘. In this webcast, he gave a great explanation on how our CNV caller aided his team in their research. If you were unable to join us for the event, you can find a recording… Read more »

Genomic Prediction Methods in SVS Q&A

         December 14, 2017
VS-CNV Annotations

Yesterday’s webcast, Genomic Prediction Methods in SVS, gave attendees a chance to see how the principles of genomic prediction are applied within SVS, predicting phenotypes for both plant and animal species. You can find a recording of the webcast on our site here should you be interested in checking it out or sharing with a colleague! The webcast garnered a… Read more »

Annotation Education Series: CNV Annotations

         November 9, 2017
CNV Annotations

With the recent upgrade to VarSeq 1.4.7, users gain access to some new great features. Among the additions are new CNV annotations (Figure 1). In this final chapter of the annotation blog series, we are going to provide descriptions of the new CNV annotations and how they can be used. The types of CNV annotations vary and include frequency, clinical… Read more »

Annotation Education Series: Frequency, Functional Prediction, and Gene Annotations

         October 26, 2017
VarSeq annotations

In our final chapter of this variant annotation blog series, we will discuss additional annotations that provide powerful variant filtering and analysis capability. Golden Helix curates many annotations in a way that allows for simple analysis and saves the users the hassle of all this data management. Whether you are trying to capture rare variants known across multiple subpopulations in… 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 »

New VarSeq Single Exome Demo Project

         September 26, 2017
single exome

As VarSeq is quickly becoming the go-to variant analysis software for tertiary analysis, we want to give our readers the opportunity to examine completed projects from start to finish. As an addition to the currently available demonstration projects, we are pleased to provide users with a Single Exome Analysis example project. To access this project simply click here to download… Read more »

Annotation Education Series: Clinical Assessment Tracks

         September 21, 2017

Clinical Assessment Tracks Golden Helix provides a large catalog of annotation sources for our research and clinical clientele. Making these public data repositories available to all our users is no easy task. As Cody Sarrazin mentioned in his blog post, annotation curation is a complex data science pipeline. This process aggregates data from many disparate sources and normalizes it into… Read more »

Frequently Asked Questions: CNV analysis in VarSeq

         July 20, 2017
CNV FAQ

The support team at Golden Helix is always here to help with your SVS and VarSeq needs. Often, we receive some excellent questions that should be shared with the rest of our users. This blog will answer some common questions we’ve been seeing lately regarding VarSeq CNV. I’ve noticed there is a version 2 of the CNV caller on Targeted Regions Algorithm, how has… Read more »