Category Archives: How to’s and advanced workflows

VSClinical Best Practice Workflows: Part II

         November 15, 2018

In part one of this series, we discussed how the ACMG Classifier can be implemented in your filter chain to support a best practice workflow. To continue our discussion on best practices of VSClinical, this blog will shed light on other attributes of VSClinical that can add support to your evaluation. Specifically, we will explore how VSClinical can help users… Read more »

VSClinical Best Practice Workflows: Part I

         November 13, 2018

VSClinical is our most recent product that allows users to evaluate variants according to the ACMG guidelines. As with any tertiary analysis, there is a need to implement best practices into your workflow and using VSClinical for the ACMG guidelines is no exception. That said, we have put together a Best Practices Blog Series, with the purpose of discussing some… 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 »

Using the GRCh38 Reference Assembly for Clinical Interpretation in VSClinical – Webcast Recap

         October 2, 2018
VCF file format

Even though GRCh37 is currently the most widely used human genome assembly, GRCh38 provides a more complete human reference genome, offers more accurate genomic analysis, and includes centromere and mitochondrial information. However, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Perhaps start with how we got here. The Human Genome Project started this all off with the world’s largest biological collaboration project in… 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 »

GWAS Quality Control Within SVS

         August 23, 2018
SVS 8

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are useful in genetics as they test for the association of a phenotype with common genetic variants. GWAS is “hypothesis-free” and does not require prior knowledge of a gene’s biological impact on a trait. The catch though is that this leads to analyzing hundreds to thousands of genome-wide array samples to elucidate single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with a specific phenotype.

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 »

VSClinical: The details you should know

         July 19, 2018
ClinVar

The recent release of VSClinical gives users the ability to evaluate variants based on the 33 criteria according to the American College of Medical Genetic and Genomics (ACMG) guidelines. This feature leverages a variety of variant sequencing evidence including population data, functional data, and computational predictions while providing rich visualizations and auto recommendations to help answer challenging criteria. This highly… Read more »

Top Webcasts of 2017

         January 9, 2018

2017 was an incredibly prosperous year for Golden Helix; we released a handful of new features, announced new partnerships and completed our end-to-end architecture for clinical testing labs. Our webcast series has become a very popular way for our community to stay up-to-date with our new capabilities and best practices in genetic analysis using our software. We had three webcast… Read more »

VSWarehouse Updates with the Power of VarSeq 1.4.7

         November 30, 2017
VSWarehouse Updates

With the recent release of VarSeq 1.4.7, we have expanded the concepts of our popular assessment catalog to include CNV and other region-based records and not just variants. To match these capabilities, we have made a major update to VSWarehouse that supports these new record types in the centrally hosted and versioned Catalogs and Reports. Review of the VSWarehouse Genomic… 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 »

Upcoming Webcast: Comprehensive Clinical Workflows for Copy Number Variants in VarSeq

         September 14, 2017
Tumor Sequencing

September 27, 2017 12:00 PM, EDT While Copy Number Variants are important to detect and interpret in many clinical genetic tests, labs have been without a comprehensive solution that integrates the annotating and reporting of high-quality CNV alongside their existing NGS variants. Golden Helix has developed and validated with our clinical partners a specialized NGS-based CNV caller capable of detecting… 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 »

Understanding Your GWAS Signal with LD Scores

         June 27, 2017
Genome-Wide Association Studies

When studying complex diseases that may have multi-genic contributions from across the genome, it is not uncommon to see what may appear like elevated correlation between your trait or other test variable and the SNPs across the genome. The problem is at first glance you won’t be able to tell if this is due to a population structure in your… Read more »

Cancer Gene Panels Tutorial

         June 13, 2017
cancer gene panel tutorial

VarSeq enables breakthrough discoveries in cancer diagnostics by supporting gene panel testing and whole exome and genome analysis. We wanted to share our Cancer Gene Panel tutorial which covers a basic gene panel workflow with an emphasis on adding, modifying and manipulating filter chains. This tutorial will start with creating a new project from an empty project template, importing data, creating… Read more »

New Tutorial: VSReports

         May 11, 2017
cancer gene panel tutorial

The new VSReports tutorial covers a basic VSReports workflow with an emphasis on understanding and exploring report customizations. This tutorial requires an active VarSeq license with the the VSReport feature included. You can go to Discover VarSeq or email info@goldenhelix.com to request an evaluation license with the VSReports functionality included. VS Reports provides the ability to generate clinical-grade reports. This feature enables VarSeq… Read more »