Category Archives: News, events, & announcements

Guest Presentation – Identifying Cardiomyopathy Genes

         May 25, 2016
Dr. Robert Hamilton

Using Whole Exome Sequencing in distant relationships to identify cardiomyopathy genes Wednesday, June 8th 12:00 pm EDT Cardiomyopathy (DCM; MIM 115200) are myocardial diseases that are frequently hereditary, yet remain gene-elusive for 60% of affected families. Traditional gene discovery techniques dependent on multigenerational samples are difficult to apply. This is because 1. Disease is often impenetrant in the youngest generation,… Read more »

CADD Scores: Rank and Filter in Harmony!

         May 19, 2016
VSClinical algorithm

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 »

ESHG 2016 – Heading to Barcelona

         May 17, 2016
ESHG 2016

In just a few days, Golden Helix will arrive in Barcelona, Spain to attend the 2016 European Society of Human Genetics Conference (ESHG). It has been some time since our team has been represented at ESHG and we are thrilled to see some of our European customers and meet some new faces in the community. This year the Golden Helix team will… Read more »

N-of-One Integration comes to VSReports

         April 28, 2016

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 »

Custom Family Workflows featured in May Webcast

         April 26, 2016

Wednesday, May 11th 12:00 pm EDT VarSeq contains default workflows for Trio analysis which include filter chains for identifying de Novo and Compound Heterozygous variants, but what if you have data for a full Quad or even just a few siblings? How could your VarSeq workflow be adjusted to handle this custom family structure?In this presentation we will demonstrate how… Read more »

Teaching Bioinformatics Concepts & Practical Skills

         April 19, 2016
Teaching Bioinformatics

New breakthroughs are being made every day in genomics. It’s a dynamic and fascinating industry, and with exceptional growth forecasted in the DNA sequencing market, a new generation of people are entering the field: future researchers, clinicians, counselors and doctors. This new generation will need to learn not only the science, but also understand how to process the massive amounts… Read more »

Guest Presentation by Dr. Folefac Aminkeng

         April 7, 2016
Dr. Folefac Aminkeng

Dr. Folefac Aminkeng, first place winner in this year’s Abstract Challenge, will present his work to the community via a live webcast on Wednesday, April 20th at noon EDT.  Dr. Aminkeng is a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. Aminkeng’s research focus is the pharmacogenomics of adverse… Read more »

Recent Customer Publications

         April 5, 2016
Recent Customer Publications

Recent Customer Publications Recently we announced that our customers named the Golden Helix software in 1,000 published articles! It was quite an honor for us and we are excited to start working toward 2,000. To start us off, here are a few of our recent customer publications. Fielding Hejtmancik and his colleagues at the NEI published, Polymorphism rs7278468 is associated with… Read more »

20 Most Promising Biotech Technology Solution Providers

         March 31, 2016
Biotech Technology Solution Providers

Golden Helix Featured in 20 Most Promising Biotech Technology Solution Providers for 2016! This month, CIO Review released a Biotech Technology Special in which Golden Helix was named among the 20 most promising biotech technology solution providers for 2016. Read the interview with our CEO, Andreas Scherer here: Empowering Precision Medicine through Next-Gen Technology Our customers are monumental in this… Read more »

Getting Started with VSWarehouse – The User Experience

         March 24, 2016
VSWarehouse Updates

Wednesday, April 6th 12:00 pm EDT As the number of samples and associated data volume in a testing lab increases, it becomes imperative for labs to leverage state of the art warehousing technology that not only organizes data, but also aides and enables researchers and clinicians to perform further analysis, and ongoing research. Built on the algorithms and high-performance storage… Read more »

Golden Helix reached the 1,000 citations mark!

         March 22, 2016

Customer success is very important to us at Golden Helix. Every month we showcase their success by putting together a blog post highlighting the most recent publications. We have been compiling this list since 2003 (you can find the full list here). Today, I am very honored to announce that the Golden Helix software has assisted in one thousand publications. We have enjoyed… Read more »

Concepts and Relevance of GWAS

         March 17, 2016
Genome-Wide Association Studies

Concepts and Relevance of Genome-Wide Association Studies Genome-Wide Association Studies continue to be a very effective method for determining the underlying cause of disease, Golden Helix is happy to share our long-standing knowledge with the community. We are very happy to announce that “Concepts and Relevance of Genome-Wide Association Studies”, a paper surrounding GWAS was recently published in Science Progress… Read more »

Practical VarSeq Example – Cancer Gene Panel

         March 15, 2016

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 »

Cancer eBook – 2nd Edition

         March 10, 2016

In 1914, the German cytologist Theodor Boveri coined the phrase “Cancer is a disease of the genome”. At this time, his ideas were as equally revolutionary as they were highly contested. Fast forward. More than a hundred years later, Next-Generation Sequencing effectively permits a highly sensitive analysis of cancer cells. It can help us to understand mutations associated with cancer… Read more »

Customer Spotlight – Dr. Kazima Bulayeva

         March 8, 2016

We, at Golden Helix, would like to take the time to highlight one of our long time customers on her recent success. Since the beginning of 2015, Dr. Kazima Bulayeva of the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics (VIGG), has published in 10 scientific publications including two times Nature Genetics. We are very excited to share the research she is performing using the… Read more »

3rd Annual Abstract Challenge Winners!

         February 25, 2016

Thank you to all who submitted an abstract in the 2016 Abstract Challenge, it was a great success! With more than 30 submissions and a wide variety of topics, selecting only 3 winners very difficult! With that being said, here are the top 3 winners for this year’s Abstract Challenge: Our 1st place winner is Dr. Folefac Aminkeng, Postdoctoral Fellow… Read more »

Cancer Workflows in VarSeq

         February 19, 2016
VCF file format

Wednesday, March 2nd 12:00 pm EST Clinical labs must have the ability to go from a collection of samples and associated variants to a professional report documenting a short list of clinically relevant variants. Cancer Gene Panels are a common clinical application for genetic tests. In this webcast we will show how VarSeq and VSReports can be used to go… Read more »

The Golden Helix Soccer Team

         February 16, 2016
Golden Helix Soccer Team

The Golden Helix Soccer Team I recently received a very special email from a long time Golden Helix customer, Dr. Vanessa Hayes of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia. In 2010 Dr. Hayes, then of the J. Craig Venter Institute, joined several colleagues in collaboration on The Southern African Genome Project. The project was aimed at including African genomes in existing… Read more »

Q&A from the VSWarehouse Launch Webcast

         February 4, 2016
VSWarehouse Updates

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 »