Our team is getting ready to head to Los Angeles, CA for the American Society of Human Genetics Annual Meeting (ASHG) 2022. We are looking forward to spending the week discussing genetics with new and familiar faces! If you are planning on attending, please stop by our booth and say hello! You will find the Golden Helix team in booth… Read more »
In the era where cloud-based solutions are the default for the modern office, it may not be obvious why many laboratories and testing centers choose to host their data and analysis pipelines on-premises or on self-managed cloud services. In the recent webcast Evaluating Cloud vs On-Premises for NGS Clinical Workflows, I explored the topic of how to make infrastructure decisions… Read more »
Join the Golden Helix team at this year’s ESHG 2021 Virtual Conference! We will be presenting two different talks on our different product solutions and fielding any questions you might have. VSClinical: a comprehensive NGS clinical solution The first talk, VSClinical: a comprehensive NGS clinical solution, will be on Sun, 29 August, 14:00-15:00. This will be moderated by Golden Helix… Read more »
I remember visiting a patient in the NICU amongst the incubators, some glowing blue like tiny tanning beds to treat jaundice, all containing tiny humans – many smaller than a loaf of bread. Infants get admitted into the neonatal intensive care unit or NICU for many reasons ranging from elevated bilirubin, hypoglycemia, sepsis, and respiratory distress (RDS). Many are eventually… Read more »
The Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) is a resource developed by an international coalition of investigators, with the goal of aggregating and harmonizing both exome and genome sequencing data from a wide variety of large-scale sequencing projects (1). We have covered this annotation in-depth in other blog posts, but this resource contains over 125,000 exome sequences and around 16,000 whole genome… Read more »
Could leveraging CNV analysis for whole exome or genome sequencing help provide answers for the undiagnosed? Roughly 4% of the world’s population shares one common desire – a diagnosis (1). Though it may seem counterintuitive, a diagnosis, no matter how grim, can provide relief, validation, the chance to make plans, and have a discernible sense of future for individuals and… Read more »
I learned about Batten disease from a childhood friend’s Facebook post. Over the course of a few months, her 8-year-old, Eva, the oldest of 4 daughters – Emily, Lucy, and Carly – was rapidly going blind. Baffled, doctors ran a genetic panel that returned a devastating result – the diagnosis of Juvenile Neuronal Ceroid Lipofuscinosis or Batten disease. A broad… Read more »
VSPipeline is a command-line interface that will provide high throughput environments the ability to tap the full power of VarSeq’s algorithms and flexible project template system from any command-line context, including the existing bioinformatics pipeline. This feature is a great resource for analyzing large sample volumes as it automates importing and annotating your data, which can help streamline your analysis… Read more »
Golden Helix has just released VarSeq v2.2.3. In this update, there are notable changes that can improve CNV calling capabilities covered in this webcast. The topics discussed included: Accounting for GC content Improvements to CNV quality flags Using target filtering Updates to the CNV sensitivity and precision settings This blog post will elaborate on these capabilities and demonstrate how they… Read more »
We are excited to share our latest publication with The Journal of Precision Medicine, “Implementing the ACMG Guidelines for CNV in a Commercial Software Solution”. “In 2020, ACMG in collaboration with the ClinGen working group developed a new set of guidelines for the clinical interpretation of CNVs. While theseguidelines provide a robust set of rules for interpreting intragenic deletions and… Read more »
The GenomeAsia 100K Variant Frequency database is a pilot annotation source now available to our users. This valuable database offers a deep characterization of specific populations in Asia that can be used to drive genetic studies. GenomeAsia is comprised of whole-genome sequencing data of over 1,000 individuals from 219 populations across Asia. Using this as an annotation, users can analyze… Read more »
Orphanet is a public database available in VarSeq that aims to improve the current understanding and treatment options for patients affected by rare diseases. This resource was established in France in 1997 and has gradually grown to cover a consortium of over 40 countries in Europe. The primary goal of this database is to provide a universal nomenclature to classify… Read more »
We would like to thank everyone who entered our 2021 Abstract Competition. It is wonderful to read about the different ways Golden Helix software is being applied around the world. It is our pleasure to announce this year’s winners! First Place: Viney Gupta – All India Institute of Medical Sciences – AIIMS Digenic Inheritance in Juvenile Open-AngleGlaucoma Sign up for… Read more »
The collaboration between the Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen) consortium and the American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) recently developed published guidelines for the interpretation of CNVs called on next-generation sequencing data. These new guidelines are the first to provide a robust set of rules for the interpretation of small intragenic deletions and duplications and are now automated in VSClinical. … Read more »
Thank you for attending the webinar focused on implementing VarSeq and VSClinical for family-based workflows. If you would like to use the webinar as a reference or were not able to attend, you can access it using the following link to view ‘Family-Based Workflows in VarSeq and VSClinical. Here is a brief recap of what we discussed: This webinar demonstrated… Read more »
In continuation of our blog posts focusing on new features of VarSeq v2.2.2, here we will discuss the Latest Sample Assessment algorithm for both single nucleotide variants (SNVs) and copy number variants (CNVS). This algorithm annotates the variants of the project with the latest assessment from your variant catalog, which will show the history of interpretations made for the variants… Read more »
Didn’t catch the webcast live? No worries! We cover ‘VSClinical: A Complete Clinical Workflow Solution’ Q&A’s in this blog post. The webcast, ‘VSClinical: A Complete Clinical Workflow Solution’ demonstrated how solutions provided by Golden Helix can be implemented to cover all requirements of a clinical workspace. Specifically, this webcast focused on a detailed workflow from a bioinformatician, geneticist, and lab… Read more »
Golden Helix offers a market-leading bioinformatics solution that allows users to evaluate next-generation sequencing variants according to the ACMG and now ACGS guidelines. The ACMG guidelines were created in 2015 and are widely accepted as best practice for the interpretation of sequencing variants throughout the United States (Richard et al 2015). Very similar are the ACGS guidelines that were developed… Read more »
Our previous webcast demonstrated some of the new functionalities of VSClinical, including the ability to add ACMG frequency sources for the ACMG BA1, BS1, and PM2 criteria. This new feature was spurred by the feedback from our users, which requested supporting frequency tracks other than gnomAD Exomes and 1kG Phase3. Now, users can implement population catalogs to VSClinical such as… Read more »
In our previous webcast, Evaluating CNVs with VSClinical’s New ACMG Guidelines, we focused on a CNV deletion (12:27715515-29628122×1) in which the patient had a known disorder called Brachydactyly type E. The CNV was isolated using our VS-CNV caller and applied to the ACMG CNV guidelines using the intuitive steps of VSClinical. If you missed the webcast, you can watch the… Read more »