This year’s annual Abstract Challenge was once again a successful event. We want to thank all that participated. This year we had nearly 50 submissions and our decision was a difficult one. Here are the selected winners. This year, we had dual first place winners; Reza Sailani and Jingga Inlora of the Michael Snyder lab in the Department of Genetics at… Read more »
With a properly defined wet-lab and bioinformatics process, we are able to zero in on clinically relevant variants. How does a lab report on the outcome of their analysis? We find that most laboratories conduct their variant classification based on the guidelines formulated by the American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) for inherited diseases. The ACMG guidelines for variant classification… Read more »
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in children and one of the leading causes of death due to disease in children. Dr. Daniel Sinnett, along with Pascal St-Onge and their colleagues at Sainte-Justine University Health center have been investigating the molecular determinants of the disease to improve detection, diagnosis and treatment. One particular area of study… Read more »
Clinical labs need to be able to process samples down to a short list of variants and publish a professional report. VSReports helps scientists and clinicians alike create timely, actionable reports that can improve clinical decision making and streamline patient care by seamlessly incorporating the results of tertiary analysis into a customizable clinical report. To include the VSReports functionality in… 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 »
December’s webcast will provide the Golden Helix community with a more in-depth look at CNV analysis in VarSeq. On December 7th, Dr. Nathan Fortier will discuss the challenges and metrics surrounding CNV detection and then demonstrate VarSeq’s new capability from VCF to clinical report. Wednesday, December 7th @ 12:00 PM, EST Numerous studies have documented the role of Copy Number Variations (CNVs)… Read more »
ASHG 2016 is in our rear mirror. Again, it was bigger and better than the previous year. The conference hosted over 9,000 visitors from 66 countries. This gave the event a level of vibrancy that was evenly matched by the wonderful ambiance of the city of Vancouver. Nestled in between the two conference centers was a little pier offering spectacular… 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 »
Today we reached an important milestone. We have registered over 10,000 confirmed eBook downloads. Of course we are thrilled! Over the years, we aimed to contribute relevant content to the community. For some time, we have blogged and conducted webinars on the latest technology, methods and best practices. Our eBooks were the latest addition to this mix. We received a… Read more »
After the Wet Lab process has been completed, the bioinformatics analysis of the sequencing data work begins. The next three blogs will focus on three aspects of this process. The building blocks of a bioinformatics pipeline, documentation and validation (today’s topic) Quality Management Clinical Reporting The Building Blocks of an NGS PipelineThe bioinformatics process to analyze NGS data occurs in three… Read more »
Join us for a guest presentation Personalized Medicine through Tumor Sequencing by Dr. Jeffrey Rosenfeld! Wednesday, September 7th 12:00 pm EDT The identification of medications that target specific gene mutations is one of the major recent advances in cancer therapy. In 2001 Gleevec was approved to treat patients with the BCR-ABL fusion in chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Since then many more drugs… Read more »
Every month hundreds of clinicians and researchers access the variety of free resources on the Golden Helix website. Our resource library hosts eBooks, webcasts and tutorials to keep the community apprised of new methods, informed on best practices and to help our customers get the most out of their software purchase. Here is a list of the 5 most watched webcasts… Read more »
Since 1999, Bonei Olam has been providing large-scale funding for fertility treatment and research. The non-profit’s mission is to provide whatever means or resources necessary to help childless couples achieve the dream of parenthood. Today, it is recognized in the worldwide medical arena for its leadership role at the forefront of reproductive medicine, research and technology. Specifically, Bonei Olam has… Read more »
Variant Normalization: Underappreciated Critical Infrastructure It may surprise you to learn that every variant in the human genome has an infinite number of representations! Of course, although true, I’m being a bit hyperbolic to prove a point. Even seemingly simple mutations like single letter substitutions are legitimately represented differently in the local context of other mutations that can be described… Read more »
The Bioinformatics Program at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, the state’s only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, plays an integral part in the center’s precision medicine program helping to bring personalized medicine to patients in a timely manner. The Program needs to determine what mutations from a tumor are relevant to a particular therapeutic option, bringing the right… Read more »
Today we have another round of customer publications from our incredible clients to share with you! These latest pubs cover a variety of topics, from rat-tail syndrome in cattle to the first GWAS analysis of attempted suicide by individuals with schizophrenia. Here are a few of the highlights: Christa Kuehn of the Liebnez Institute for Farm Animal Biology and colleagues published Epistatic interactions between… Read more »
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 »
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 »
