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 launched our eCommerce Store. With this capability we respond to our customers requesting a simplified way to conduct business with us. Here is the background on this latest development. As we continue to grow in the genomics space, the needs of our clients fall really into two categories. On one hand, there are clients who want convenient access to our… Read more »
Whole exome sequencing workflows using SNP & Variation Suite (SVS) was presented in a recent webcast, by Dr. Robert Hamilton from the Hospital for Sick Kids. In particular, he performed some filtering on his data to look for only heterozygous variants in his sample of interest, removed variants with allele frequency less than 0.005% based off of the ExAC Variant Frequency… Read more »
King Abdulaziz Medical City (KAMC) in Riyadh commenced its operations in May 1983. Since then, it has continued expanding, while providing services for a rapidly growing patient population in all of its catchments areas. Today, King Fahad National Guard Hospital has evolved to be part of the King Abdulaziz Medical City with many other prominent medical centers. Since its inauguration… Read more »
When the new human reference genome was released over two years ago, it was hailed as a significant step forward for next generation sequencing. Compared to GRCh37, the new GRCH38 reference assembly fixed gaps, repaired incorrect sequences and offered access to sections of the genome that had been previously unaccounted for. Despite these improvements, adoption of the new assembly has… Read more »
The power of VSPipeline is in it’s ability to automate VarSeq workflows. Using VarSeq to create a pipeline template is great because it allows you to dial in the applied filters as well as interactively organize the annotations and applied algorithms. Automating a workflow with VSPipeline is straightforward when beginning with an existing project. However, there are several steps that… Read more »
Dr. James Fielding Hejtmancik and his team at the National Eye Institute’s Ophthalmic Genetics and Visual Function branch, use linkage and association studies to better understand the genetic mechanisms of inherited eye disease. The team investigates both Mendelian and complex diseases as well as functional work with a focus on cataracts, retinal degenerations, myopia and corneal dystrophies. “If it affects… Read more »
As the need to educate prospective healthcare professionals in the interpretation of genetic data increases, Dr. Jeffrey Moore at the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign is using genetics in his chemistry courses. In doing so, Moore is creating a strong connection between the content in his courses and the underlying principles of health and medicine. Last year, Dr. Moore presented a webcast… Read more »
I’m very glad I had the chance to attend ESHG 2016 in Barcelona and talk to so many people about Golden Helix and our software at our booth. ESHG may be the little sibling in size compared to ASHG, but my impression is that it punches above its weight in terms of advancing human genetics applicability to human health and… Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
During the webcast yesterday, I demonstrated a few ways of customizing de Novo Candidate and Compound Heterozygous Candidate workflows to consider family structure that was slightly different from the default trio workflow. The families included additional affected and unaffected siblings added to a trio as well as looking at what could be done if there were only two affected siblings… Read more »
Last week, I attended the Advances in Medical Genetics conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I was asked to present on “Big Data in DNA Analytics”. The event was hosted by Prof. Dr. Majid Alfadhel of the King Saud Bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences in collaboration with the Postgraduate Training Center. The event was held to discuss the pros and cons surrounding the… Read more »
Solving the Eigenvalue Decomposition Problem for Large Sample Sizes Since our introduction of the mixed model methods in SVS, along with GBLUP, we have been very pleased to see it used by a number of customers working with human and agri-genomic data. As these customers have grown their genomics programs, the number of samples they have for a given analysis… Read more »
Scott Diehl, a professor and geneticist at Rutgers School of Dental Medicine, performs family studies, association studies and gene mapping to discover the genetic causes of periodontal diseases. Originally, Diehl had a large team of bioinformaticians in the lab to help with his analyses, but the high cost of such personnel created the need for another solution. With Golden Helix’s… 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 »
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 »
ICGC’s database is now available For quite a while, COSMIC has been synonymous with the catalog of “known somatic mutations”. It is the ClinVar of cancer mutations and invests heavily in “expert curation” (having human experts read papers and pull out references to published somatic mutations). But it turns out there is a new kid on the block, and he… Read more »
