VarSeq 2.2.2 was released on December 17th, 2020 and the main feature that was added to VarSeq was that the VSClinical ACMG Guidelines workflow now has an additional CNV interpretation framework based on the ACMG/ClinGen guidelines. This product supports interpreting CNVs detected with VS-CNV or imported CNVs alongside variants and requires both a VSClinical ACMG license and a CNV license…. Read more »
We encourage you to share how you are utilizing Golden Helix software in your clinical research work! Golden Helix strives to enable precision medicine by developing powerful software to support researchers and clinicians with complex analyses. One of my favorite events of the year is our abstract competition. This competition allows us to help our community by recognizing innovative ways… Read more »
In our previous webcast, Evaluating CNVs with VSClinical’s New ACMG Guidelines, we focused on a CNV deletion (12:27715515-29628122×1) in which the patient had a known disorder called Brachydactyly type E. The CNV was isolated using our VS-CNV caller and applied to the ACMG CNV guidelines using the intuitive steps of VSClinical. If you missed the webcast, you can watch the… Read more »
Special pricing offers on our End-of-Year software bundles. It’s that time of year again! Golden Helix End-of-Year bundles have been released. We are currently offering our industry-leading products in special bundles for you to simplify and accelerate your current workflows. Whether analyzing and classifying variants, detecting large copy number variant events, or automating your workflow, our software bundles have options… Read more »
Those of you who have been attending our recent webcasts have learned about our upcoming VarSeq release. A part of that release will be an additional algorithm that will annotate variants matching the current sample. If you are not familiar with these webcasts, here are several on-demand webcasts I recommend to get you familiar with these new features: Evaluating Copy… Read more »
In the webcast, Evaluation of Copy Number Variants with VSClinical’s New ACMG Guideline Workflow, we discussed how VSClinical implements Section 4 of the ACMG guidelines. Specifically, we focused on integrating literature and publications to assess the pathogenicity of a CNV event when there was a lack of dosage sensitivity information. One of the primary pieces of evidence for evaluating genes… Read more »
Our team is regularly updating and curating annotations, most recently the BRCA Exchange. Breast cancer is known to occur in approximately 10% of the female population and if there is a damaging mutation in the breast cancer gene (BRCA), that rate increases to 65%. Although genetic testing can identify mutations in BRCA, a tumor suppressor gene, it has been difficult… Read more »
Golden Helix is excited to release an upcoming VSClinical feature that allows users to analyze next-generation sequencing (NGS) CNV event reporting with ACMG guidelines. This feature will be the first in the NGS workspace to allow this capability and if you are curious about the functionalities you can get a sneak peek by looking at some of our most recent… Read more »
In a recent webcast, users were exposed to some new features upcoming in the next release of VarSeq. In this update, we will use an example de Novo CNV in a cardiomyopathy panel in VarSeq. There is a long list of new tools and polishes to the software but one major upgrade is the inclusion of the ACMG and ClinGen… Read more »
Our previous webcast from VP Gabe Rudy in September exposed us to some fundamentals of this years’ updated Technical standards for the interpretation and reporting of constitutional copy-number variants: a joint consensus recommendation of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) and the Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen). This recent webcast was dedicated to breaking down these new guidelines… Read more »
Did you know you can control your preferred transcript settings for clinical interpretation in VSClinical? Your lab is analyzing the DNA of a tissue sample from a patient with small cell lung cancer. The lab technician has imported the patient data into VSClinical to detect clinically relevant variants and evaluate and score these according to the AMP Guidelines, as well… Read more »
In this blog update, I’ll be walking you through some of the advanced plotting capabilities with GenomeBrowse. The strategy with any next-gen sequencing analysis is to filter down to interesting variants for either research or clinical conclusion. Golden Helix produces powerful software specifically tailored for this efficient and comprehensive search for interesting and clinically relevant variants. One additional advantage of… Read more »
VSClinical is a feature to evaluate clinically relevant variants according to the ACMG or AMP guidelines. This feature can also be used to identify if a variant has been observed previously or evaluate a manually inserted variant. Take, for example, the scenario where a colleague is interested to see if you have seen any variants associated with Bechet syndrome, which… Read more »
In our recent webcast announcing the upcoming release of VarSeq VSClinical and the implementation of the ACMG guidelines for NGS CNVs, we had a number of live questions we didn’t get a chance to cover at the end of the presentation. I will follow up on those questions in this blog post. But first, if you didn’t get a chance to join us for… Read more »
In the 1990s the genetic industry voiced a request for a variant catalog that incorporates associated variant information such as phenotypic and metabolic pathways. The call was answered by NCBI, which created dbSNP; dbSNP became publicly available in 1998 and around 1.5 million variants. Fast forward to the present and dbSNP now contains over 2 billion SNPs spanning human, rat,… Read more »
We have now reached the final blog of the NGS-Solutions for Clinical Variant Analysis series. Part I of this series explored the capture of variant classifications in the VSClinical environment when following the ACMG and AMP guidelines. Part II was similar in content but for the capture of clinically relevant copy number variants as well as using a CNV catalog… Read more »
The potential of genetic testing to impact a patient’s life has been greatly accelerated by the sharing of variant interpretations done by clinical labs in public repositories such as ClinVar. This is not an inevitable outcome, but the persistent work and advocacy of people like Dr. Heidi Rehm and organizations like ClinGen. We recently participated in a survey and vetting… Read more »
SVS 8.9.0 was released on August 19th and features a new GBLUP by Bin feature and a new utility to find the LD scores of markers and categorize them into bins, along with several mixed-model upgrades and many other upgrades, fixes, and polishes. The two new features LD Score Computation and Binning and Compute GBLUP Using Bins, while they can… Read more »
Our software solutions and partners have brought dramatic improvements to the secondary and tertiary analysis stages of variant evaluation. Regarding secondary analysis, we’ve discussed increased efficiencies in speed and overall accuracy in the variant calling process with Sentieon. On the tertiary side, we have explored numerous workflows in VarSeq highlighting filtration to clinically relevant variants, as well as the automated… Read more »
The detection and interpretation of Copy Number Variants (CNVs) is vital for the clinical evaluation of individuals with a wide range of disorders. Golden Helix has remained at the forefront of CNVs in Next-Gen Sequencing (NGS) data since 2016 with the release of VS-CNV, our solution that allows you to both detect and analyze CNVs directly from NGS data. Earlier… Read more »
