As VarSeq gains in popularity, we want to give Viewers and customers alike the opportunity to look at projects that are completed from start to finish. To this end, VarSeq (and VarSeq Viewer!) currently comes with two demonstration projects, Example TruSight Cardio Gene Panel and Example YRI Exome Trio Analysis. To access these projects from the VarSeq start page go to… Read more »
Our webcast yesterday featured two clinical workflows and and the ease in moving from an unfiltered variant file to a clinical report containing the variants of interest using VarSeq and VSReports. There were several great questions and I wanted to pass on a few of particular interest. Question: Are annotation sources included in VarSeq for free?
While VarSeq comes with a number of starter workflows that are stored as templates, customers also have the option of creating filter chains from scratch; analyzing a single exome may require you to do exactly that. In this blog, I’ll go through analyzing a single exome and generating a list of variants for further study. After importing the variant data… Read more »
The 65th annual ASHG in Baltimore will be another exciting one. We at Golden Helix have been very busy this year making great improvements to both SVS and the VarSeq software and we look forward to showcasing them during our in-booth demos. In particular, we will launch two new additions to the VarSeq software suite; VSReports and VSWarehouse. VSReports brings highly customizable clinical… Read more »
Yesterday, our VP of Product and Engineering, Gabe Rudy, presented VSReports to the Golden Helix community for the first time in a live webcast; Authoring Clinical Reports in VarSeq. It was an excellent presentation. Gabe highlighted VSReports’ ability to take the output of tertiary analysis to a customized clinical grade report in one click. He also gave an overview of… Read more »
The next release of VarSeq will ship a new product that is highly relevant to our customers in clinical testing labs. Via VSReports, VarSeq now has the ability to generate clinical-grade reports. These reports are fully customizable, containing focused and actionable data. VS Reports ships with report templates that are modeled off of the ACMG guidelines, the de-facto gold standard… Read more »
With our latest release of VarSeq last Thursday, we are proud to offer the VarSeq ® Viewer to the community, for free! When you download VarSeq ® Viewer, you can explore pre-built projects to interact with the annotations and filters the project provides, visualize selected variants with pile-ups, and export data to widely used formats. To get you started, we have included… Read more »
A widely attended conference that is coming up on September 21-23 is the third international conference on Genomics 2015 in San Antonio, Texas. The theme of this year’s conference is “Implications and Impacts of Genomic Advances on Global Health“, which promises to provide some interesting presentations and discussions. Current issues in the field to be addressed include next-gen sequencing, clinical and… 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 »
Have you ever scratched your head when looking up a variant and it seems like the number you have for its position is one off from what it looks like in the file or database? You may be running into the dreaded world of 1-based versus 0-based coordinate representation! If it’s any consolation, I can promise that all the bioinformaticians… Read more »
A prerequisite for clinical NGS interpretation is ensuring that the data being analyzed is of high enough quality to support the test results being returned to the physician. The keystone of this quality control process is coverage analysis. Coverage analysis has two distinct parts. Ensure that there is sufficient coverage to be confident in called variants Make certain that no… Read more »
I was definitely an early adopter when it comes to personal genomics. In a recent email to their customer base announcing their one millionth customer, they revealed that I was customer #44,299. And I have been consistently impressed with the product 23andMe provides through their web interface to make your hundreds of thousands of genotyped SNPs accessible and useful. It… 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 »
One of the lesser known functions in SVS allows the user to create Venn diagrams comparing variants found in multiple spreadsheets. These different spreadsheets could come from individuals samples, a case vs. control group or several variant databases. It is a helpful tool for visually comparing different variants. Start by creating spreadsheets for each group/samples you’d like to compare. The… Read more »
This last week I had the pleasure of attending the fourth annual Clinical Genome Conference (TCGC) in Japantown, San Francisco and kicking off the conference by teaching a short course on Personal Genomics Variant Analysis and Interpretation. Some highlights of the conference from my perspective: Talking about clinical genomics is no longer a wonder-fest of individual case studies, but a… 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 »
The support team at Golden Helix is always on-hand to help with your SVS and VarSeq needs. We get some questions more often than others, and this blog will answer some of the most common questions we’ve been seeing lately regarding VarSeq. A common question we receive is if data can be filtered from a locally kept set of variants… 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 »
