Bridging the gap between genetics and organic chemistry at UIUC

         December 9, 2014

As Dr. Andreas Scherer mentioned in a blog post earlier this year, Golden Helix is committed to supporting the education of the next generation of genetic researchers. And as such, over the course of 2014, we at Golden Helix are working with education programs across the US and Canada to make teaching and learning bioinformatics easier. This fall semester at the… Read more »

VarSeq: A bioinformatics Swiss Army knife

         December 5, 2014

If you’ve seen the recent webinars given by Gabe Rudy and Bryce Christensen, you’ve no doubt been impressed by the capabilities of VarSeq when it comes to annotation and filtering. However, we sometimes forget that the power that enables all this complex analysis can also be used in more mundane tasks like VCF subsetting. And although these day-to-day tasks don’t… Read more »

Announcing the 2015 Abstract Challenge

         December 2, 2014

Last year, as part of our ongoing commitment to empower genetic research, we hosted our first research competition. The competition was very successful and now we will make the competition an annual event. Here at Golden Helix, we are dedicated to creating powerful software that enables researchers to complete complex analysis. This competition allows us to enable discovery by awarding… Read more »

Analyzing Whole Exome, Large-n Cohorts in SVS

         November 25, 2014

It’s come to my attention in recent weeks, through various customer interactions, that many are not aware of the fantastic functionalities that exist in SNP and Variation Suite (SVS) for large-n DNASeq workflows; this includes large cohort analyses with case/control variables. The data you’ll see below is the publically available 1kG Phase 1 v3 Exome sequences from 1,092 individuals with… Read more »

6 Population Catalogs Compared with the ExAC 61,486 Exomes

         November 13, 2014

To say the announcement of Dan MacArthur’s group’s release of the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC) data was highly anticipated at ASHG 2014 would be an understatement. Basically, there were two types of talks at ASHG. Those that proceeded the official ExAC release talk and referred to it, and those that followed the talk and referred to it. Why is this… Read more »

Don’t miss the VarSeq user experience webcast tomorrow!

         November 4, 2014

We are shortly approaching the public launch (November 5th!) of our first clinical product, VarSeq. We could not have predicted how well the market would accept VarSeq – but we couldn’t be happier! For those of you who have not yet seen our newest product in action, I invite you to register for tomorrow’s webcast: The Golden Helix VarSeq User Experience.

Check out our newest t-shirts!

         October 30, 2014

As you might recall, we hosted our first annual t-shirt design contest this summer. We announced the winners, but kept the winning t-shirt designs themselves top secret until ASHG where we unveiled them day by day. But, if you did not attend ASHG last week, you are probably still on the edge of your seat. Well, luckily, I will reveal… Read more »

Final thoughts on ASHG14

         October 28, 2014

To make a long story short, we had a blast at ASHG14. The traffic at our booth was terrific. Every day we had scheduled presentations on VarSeq, SVS, and GenomeBrowse which were very well attended. And of course, there were our new t-shirts. The new designs were well received. If anything we promise to bring more next year. In particular more… Read more »

New Plugin for Ion Torrent Server

         October 21, 2014

Golden Helix is proud to announce the release of the Golden Helix GenomeBrowse Plugin for Ion Torrent server. The new plug-in enables adding selected BAM files from Torrent Server reports directly into GenomeBrowse. The BAM files remain on the torrent server and are streamed from the server on demand using your credentials. This feature allows GenomeBrowse users to visualize genomic… Read more »

A little known fact about Box Plots

         October 16, 2014

A helpful tool that is included in SVS, but many of our customers may not know about, is the ability to create Box Plots or box-and-whisker plots. These are effective visualizations for comparing groups of numerical data through the data quartiles. I’ll take you through a couple different cases with examples.

A new chapter for Golden Helix

         October 14, 2014

In our latest webcast (which introduced our newest product, VarSeq), Dr. Andreas Scherer, President and CEO of Golden Helix, announced the completion of 2 e-Books; one entitled Clinical Next-Gen Sequencing Analysis and one GWAS. Dr. Scherer published these e-books as part of Golden Helix’s continued effort to provide educational content to our clients and the genetic community as well as to put a… Read more »

Variant Notation: In simplicity we find complexity

         October 9, 2014

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about Human Genome Variation Society (HGVS) notation — you know “G dot”, “P dot”, and “C dot”. HGVS has quickly become one of the most common ways to represent variants.  It’s no wonder that HGVS nomenclature is used so widely. It provides an easily readable, compact representation of a variant. Since it is… Read more »

ASHG Happenings

         October 8, 2014

It’s that time of year again. The mornings are chilly, the leaves are falling, and ASHG is right around the corner. This year will mark my very first ASHG and I am really looking forward to meeting some of the Golden Helix community! The team has been hard at work preparing for a great conference and I wanted to give you… Read more »

VarSeq: Making Variant Discovery and Gene Panels Easy

         September 29, 2014

Last week, our CEO Andreas Scherer announced our entrance into the clinical testing market with VarSeq. This week, I will be giving a webcast on Wednesday introducing this new tool and demonstrating its capabilities. (Register for the webcast) VarSeq’s focused purpose is making NGS gene testing and variant discovery efficient, scalable and accessible to users with a broad range of backgrounds and specialties. In this blog post, we will examine the use cases that VarSeq supports in more detail,… Read more »

Entering the Clinical Testing Market with VarSeq

         September 25, 2014

The adoption of genetic services is key to our ability to provide personalized medicine in the future. The goal is to better diagnose diseases, predict their outcomes, and to choose the best possible care option for a patient. Our part here at Golden Helix is to essentially build the equivalent of an MRI for the genome. In this process the latest… Read more »

A few thoughts from IGES

         September 18, 2014

Late last month I had the opportunity to attend one of my favorite events: the annual meeting of the International Genetic Epidemiology Society (IGES).  This year’s conference was held in Vienna, in conjunction with the Genetic Analysis Workshop (GAW) and the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics (ICBS).  The program at IGES this year was very diverse, with content ranging from… Read more »