It may be possible to say that annotating a variant correctly and accurately against gene transcripts is the most important job of a variant annotation and interpretation tool. We take it very seriously at Golden Helix as we support VarSeq and its use by our customers in both research and clinical contexts. It has been a source of frustration that… Read more »
It may have been easy to miss in the drum-beat of monthly annotation updates we do here at Golden Helix, but there are a couple of things that are very special about the January update to the ClinVar database: We added new fields including HGVS names of variants and citations in PubMed for variants ClinVar nearly doubled in size by… Read more »
Dr. Laura Li and her colleagues at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) are working to determine the underlying genetic causes of Optic Nerve Hypoplasia (ONH), which is still unclear. ONH is the absence or under-development of the optic nerve and is currently the leading ocular cause of vision impairments and blindness in young children. ONH can also be combined… Read more »
While clinical assessments of germline mutations have been collected in ClinVar under the stewardship of the NCBI and the collaborate effort of many testing labs, the same type of resource has been missing for mutations that could informal clinical care in Cancer. Or at least, that is what I thought until I started to work with CIViC. With the stewardship of… Read more »
Copy Number Variants have been important to clinical genetics for quite a while now. So, what has made now the right time to be looking at calling CNVs from NGS data? Well, there are a number of good reasons. The dominant one is simply that the NGS data you are already creating for calling variants can be used in many cases… Read more »
In our SVS 8.6.0 release, we updated our Annotate and Filter Variants feature to utilize our powerful VarSeq annotations. Annotations can be run against gene, interval, variant, and tabular tracks, including RefSeq, ClinVar, CADD, OMIM and OncoMD. The new streamlined dialog allows users to select track specific options and to set up custom filters. While our public annotation repository has… Read more »
There used to be much energy expended at conferences, bioinformatics forums and even publications about what was the better strategy for interpreting variants of clinical significance: Rule-based filtering and classification mechanisms or rank-based prioritization through all-encompassing “pathogenicity” scores. Both have shown to be effective. Rule-based systems, as exemplified in this filtering diagram in Baylor’s ground-breaking paper on clinical whole-exome sequencing… Read more »
Submit directly to N-of-One from VarSeq If you or your lab uses N-of-One solutions for clinical annotations, here’s some good news: You can now submit directly to N-of-One from VarSeq! N-of-One’s set of preferred transcripts may differ from those outputted by our algorithms in VarSeq, so our solution was built with that in mind. Our slick, easy to use, and… Read more »
Clinical reports come in all shapes, sizes and flavors. With that in mind, our clinical reporting interface VSReports was built to be highly customizable and flexible. With a little Javascript and HTML know-how, your clinical reports can be customized to meet the needs and goals of your lab. With a little Javascript and HTML know how, you can customize yours as… Read more »
Recently, we were excited to find a new example data set for cancer gene panels. We have included this example data in the latest e-book by Dr. Andreas Scherer, Genetic Testing for Cancer as well as in the latest cancer webcast . This data is from Illumina’s MiniSeq sequencer and the TruSight Cancer panel. The BAM and VCF files for three samples… Read more »
As VarSeq continues its adoption amongst clinical labs and researchers looking for reproducible workflows for variant annotation, filtering and interpretation, we have continued to prioritize the addition of features to assess the quality of the upstream data at a variant, coverage and now sample level. The Importance of Quality Assurance Sample prep and sequencing problems are difficult to detect through the analysis… Read more »
Yesterday, it was my pleasure to share in a live webcast our integrated solution for genetic data warehousing, VSWarehouse. If you missed the webcast live, feel free to check out the recording. Although we had a great set of questions at the end of our presentation, we didn’t have time to answer all of them, so here is a selection of… Read more »
The most common use of the VarSeq Match Gene List algorithm of course is to determine if the variants in your data set are contained within your genes of interest. As an example of this, say you are working with a whole exome trio and only want to consider those variants that are contained within the 56 genes recommended by… Read more »
As VarSeq’s adoption has grown among analysts using whole exome data to diagnose rare diseases, a couple of family designs outside of the common trio of an affected child and both parents have come up frequently. While having both parents provides the maximum power to discover de novo mutations and recessively inherited variants, it is not always possible to contact… Read more »
With the release of VarSeq 1.3.1 we have included a new demo project to showcase a single tumor-normal pair analysis workflow. The project can be accessed through VarSeq and VarSeq Viewer by going to File > Open Example Projects > Example Tumor-Normal Pair Analysis. This project contains an exome pair (Normal-N990005 and Tumor-T990005) from the Gastric Cancer study Exome sequencing of… Read more »
With the release of VSReports, we added the ability to “select” rows of your filtered output (often variants, but potentially things like coverage regions or genes) with a new feature dubbed “Record Sets”, but more often described as “colored checkboxes” for your tables. Although necessary for the important task of marking primary, secondary or other sets of variants for a… Read more »
As VarSeq gains in popularity, we want to give Viewers and customers alike the opportunity to look at projects that are completed from start to finish. To this end, VarSeq (and VarSeq Viewer!) currently comes with two demonstration projects, Example TruSight Cardio Gene Panel and Example YRI Exome Trio Analysis. To access these projects from the VarSeq start page go to… Read more »
While VarSeq comes with a number of starter workflows that are stored as templates, customers also have the option of creating filter chains from scratch; analyzing a single exome may require you to do exactly that. In this blog, I’ll go through analyzing a single exome and generating a list of variants for further study. After importing the variant data… Read more »
Precision Medicine e-Book “It’s far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has.” – Hippocrates (460 BC – 370 BC) Almost 2,500 years ago, Hippocrates captured one of the key principles underlying precision medicine. In the 21st century we take the understanding of the individual characteristics of a person to a new level…. Read more »
Recently, Golden Helix, Inc. announced the addition of VSPipeline to our VarSeq software suite. VSPipeline is a command-line interface that will allow 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 existing bioinformatics pipeline. So, what is the big deal? Here are the top five… Read more »
