We absolutely love case studies because they allow us to check in on our customers work and see how they are using our software. Not only is this useful feedback for our development team, but it is also an excellent way to share user experiences with prospective clients. We wanted to share a few snippets from our most popular case studies in case… Read more »
The current reduced cost and increase availability of genome sequencing has been making academics, clinicians and individuals alike excited with the possibility of increased research depth, diagnosing capability and personal curiosity. And although a freshly sequenced genome is chock-full of tasty letter snippets, the real revelation and education occurs when comparing to an annotation foundation. In this post, I’ll review… Read more »
VarSeq enables breakthrough discoveries in cancer diagnostics by supporting gene panel testing and whole exome and genome analysis. We wanted to share our Cancer Gene Panel tutorial which covers a basic gene panel workflow with an emphasis on adding, modifying and manipulating filter chains. This tutorial will start with creating a new project from an empty project template, importing data, creating… Read more »
We are back from another exciting trip to ESHG, hosted in Copenhagen, Denmark last week. We were delighted by the number of researchers and clinicians we were able to connect with. Needless to say, the weather was outstanding in Copenhagen, which made our stay even more pleasant! Even though this was a European event, it was great to be able to speak with… Read more »
We are ending the first half of the year with a webcast featuring our entire clinical software stack: Golden Helix’s End-to-End Solution for Clinical Labs. This webcast is scheduled for Wednesday, June 7th at noon EST, and it’s not one you’ll want to miss! Here are the full details: Wednesday, June 7th 12:00 pm EST In this webcast we will provide an… Read more »
Annotating with gnomAD: Frequencies from 123,136 Exomes and 15,496 Genomes When the Broad Institute team lead by Dan MacArthur announced at ASHG 2016 that the successor to the popular ExAC project (frequencies of 61,486 exomes) was live at http://gnomad.broadinstitute.org/, I thought their servers would have a melt-down as everyone immediately jumped on and started looking up their favorite genes and… Read more »
The new VSWarehouse Tutorial covers the basic VSWarehouse workflow.This tutorial focuses on connecting to a VSWarehouse instance from VarSeq, adding an existing VSWarehouse project as an annotation source and using reports and assessment catalogs hosted on VSWarehouse. This workflow requires an active VarSeq license with the VSWarehouse feature included. You can go to Discover VarSeq or email info@goldenhelix.com to request an… Read more »
In the past couple of weeks, the topic of the Filter and Quality fields in the popular ExAC population catalog has come up a number of times. It turns out that unlike the 1000 Genomes project, which decided to very heavily filter their variant list to only contain variants they consider high quality, ExAC chose to include more dubious variants… 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 »
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 »
Big data is here, but fear not, you don’t need a Hadoop cluster to analyze your genomes or your cohorts of tens of thousands of samples! It turns out, for the kind of algorithms employed in variant annotation and filtering, running optimized local programs is often faster anyway. As we support our diverse customer base, we have definitely seen the… 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Benjamin Darbro, MD, PhD at the University of Iowa, uses VarSeq® software for Clinical Testing Founded by Hans Zellweger in the 1960’s, The Shivanand R. Patil Cytogenetics and Molecular Lab at the University of Iowa has a long history of clinical testing, seeing 45 years of advancements. Today, the lab is mainly focused on oncology, pre and post-natal genetics testing… Read more »
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 »
As VarSeq’s adoption has grown among analysts using whole exome data to diagnose rare diseases, a couple of family designs outside of the common trio of an affected child and both parents have come up frequently. While having both parents provides the maximum power to discover de novo mutations and recessively inherited variants, it is not always possible to contact… Read more »
When it comes to down to it, the genomic variants we collect in a research and clinical setting are impossible to interpret without that important link of how genes are related to phenotypes. Indisputably, the Johns Hopkins project to catalog all evidence related to inheritable Mendelian diseases is our best repository of this evidence. Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM)… 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 »
