A common question that comes through support is if there are options in SVS for doing gender inference or checks. There is indeed functionality in SVS for this QC check! This function is under the Genotype Menu for Sample Statistics; there are a lot of great statistics available to check the quality of your data in SVS, but I’ll walk… Read more »
GWAS became possible about 10 years ago as the result of several scientific advances. Since then, GWAS has continually developed as a primary method for identification of disease susceptibility genes in humans and other organisms. At Golden Helix we are proud of our history in supporting GWAS analysis from its inception. Our software was used to analyze whole-genome data from… Read more »
Congratulations to all of our customers who have recently published! It’s always a pleasure to see the interesting and useful work conducted in part with the aid of our software, and we hope you enjoy reading about it as well. Bradley Aouzierat of UCSF and colleagues published Association of IFNL3 and IFNL4 polymorphisms with liver-related mortality in a multiracial cohort… Read more »
Earlier this spring we announced that Meta-Analysis was coming to SVS very soon. Now, I am pleased to announce that it is available in the latest release of SVS (version 8.4.0). Meta-Analysis takes the results of two or more GWAS studies for multiple SNPs or markers, and standard meta-analysis statistics are then performed on each SNP and the results compiled into… Read more »
VarSeq now supports analysis of paired Tumor/Normal samples! Tumor/Normal support has been one of the most common feature requests for VarSeq since it was launched late last year, and we are excited to make this functionality available to all of our VarSeq users in the latest update (version 1.1.4). VarSeq is a powerful platform for annotation and filtering of DNA… 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 »
Golden Helix recently announced the addition of VSPipeline to our VarSeq software. 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. VSPipeline supports the need to efficiently generate VarSeq projects from workflow-encoding project templates…. Read more »
Just a few weeks ago we announced our partnership with MedGenome. The news was covered by a number of outlets including: Financial Express Pharmabiz Let me expIain the importance and impact of this announcement. Since Varseq was released, we have received strong interest from testing labs that are leveraging our product to implement cancer diagnostic pipelines. Please feel free to take… Read more »
Yes, I said it. “Them be fighting words” you may say. Well, it’s worth putting a stake in the ground when you have worked hard to have a claim worth staking. We have explored the landscape, surveyed the ravines and dangerous cliffs, laboriously removed the boulders and even dynamited a few tree stumps. Stake planted. Ok, so now I’m going… Read more »
There’s a strong desire in the genetics community for a set of canonical transcripts. It’s a completely understandable and reasonable thing to want since it would simplify many aspects of analysis and especially the downstream communicating and reporting of variants. Unfortunately, biology isn’t so tidy as to provide a clear answer for which transcript is the important one. Consequently, there… Read more »
The Educational Challenge Precision medicine will fundamentally change how health care is practiced. Of course, we have a long way to go. For most practitioners today, their knowledge of the human genome was established many years ago. However, new therapies and diagnostic methods are pouring in on a daily basis. So, how do we make sure that the current and… Read more »
Bioinformatics Pipelines and Systems Infrastructure The genetics industry is undergoing a fundamental shift from a clinical science focus to a bioinformatics focus. Genetic services require a greater level of data analytics sophistication than is required for other laboratory testing. Currently, data generated by new tests overwhelms current information technology systems and human interpretation capabilities. This is one of the reasons… Read more »
Meta-analysis is an important tool to have in the bioinformatics toolbox. The numbers alone speak for themselves. It is the fourth most requested feature for SVS, and a simple google scholar search for 2014 and 2015 find 17,300 results for genetics + meta-analysis. There are several meta-analysis utilities out there that will take results from studies and perform the meta-analysis…. Read more »
As VarSeq has been evaluated and chosen by more and more clinical labs, I have come to respect how unique each lab’s analytical use cases are. Different labs may specialize in cancer therapy management, specific hereditary disorders, focused gene panels or whole exomes. Some may expect to spend just minutes validating the analytics and the presence or absence of well-characterized… Read more »
Last week we conducted a webcast on “Cancer Gene Panels”; you can find the recording here. We had some excellent questions which we answered during the webcast and a few more that we didn’t get to in the allotted time. Please find answers to those questions here: 1. Are Cancer Gene Panels just another stepping stone on the way to… Read more »
I spent a very eventful week at the Molecular TriCon in downtown San Francisco, and have been pondering the very clear trends that emerged by attending the clinical and NGS focused talks. Cancer gene panels make sense economically and as “massively parallel” tests to inform therapy, but they are bound to get more complex. Liquid biopsies of circulating tumor DNA… Read more »
In just 5 days, the 22nd International Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference (Tri-Con) will kick off in San Francisco. This year, Tri-Con will offer over 3,000 attendees 6 symposia, over 20 short courses, and 17 conference programs focused on drug discovery, genomics, diagnostics, and information technology surrounding, molecular medicine. Both Dr. Andreas Scherer, CEO of Golden Helix and Gabe Rudy, our Vice President of… Read more »
In recent months we have been updating our public annotation library to include the most recent versions of existing sources, as well as include new sources. All of these annotation sources are compatible with our three major products, VarSeq, SVS, and GenomeBrowse, and can be used for visualization, annotation, and filtering. dbNSFP NS Functional Predictions 2.8, GHI and dbNSFP Predictions… Read more »
One frequent question I hear from SVS customers is whether whole exome sequence data can be used for principal components analysis (PCA) and other applications in population genetics. The answer is, “yes, but you need to be cautious.” What does cautious mean? Let’s take a look at the 1000 Genomes project for some examples.
There is a lot we can be grateful for at Golden Helix. The past year was marked by two major breakthrough launches. Earlier in 2014, we shipped SVS 8 which unified SVS with our GenomeBrowse product. We were able to improve SVS’ data management and visualization capabilities. In addition we added a number of new methods in SVS, such as SKAT-O, MM-KBAC, and various genomic prediction algorithms.
