Genome-wide association study (GWAS) technology has been a primary method for identifying the genes responsible for diseases and other traits for the past ten years. GWAS continues to be highly relevant as a scientific method. Over 2000 human GWAS reports now appear in scientific journals. In fact, we see its adoption increasing beyond the human-centric research into the world of… Read more »
Just as we expected, 2017 has kicked off with a flurry of new publications by our customers. We even had a publication from a client using our VarSeq software! Congratulations to all, please take a look at some of the articles we have highlighted below: Reza Sailani of Stanford University and colleagues published Association of AHSG with alopecia and mental retardation… Read more »
With a properly defined wet-lab and bioinformatics process, we are able to zero in on clinically relevant variants. How does a lab report on the outcome of their analysis? We find that most laboratories conduct their variant classification based on the guidelines formulated by the American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) for inherited diseases. The ACMG guidelines for variant classification… Read more »
It may have been easy to miss in the drum-beat of monthly annotation updates we do here at Golden Helix, but there are a couple of things that are very special about the January update to the ClinVar database: We added new fields including HGVS names of variants and citations in PubMed for variants ClinVar nearly doubled in size by… Read more »
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in children and one of the leading causes of death due to disease in children. Dr. Daniel Sinnett, along with Pascal St-Onge and their colleagues at Sainte-Justine University Health center have been investigating the molecular determinants of the disease to improve detection, diagnosis and treatment. One particular area of study… Read more »
It sure is feeling like Christmas time in Montana with the piles of fluffy snow and negative temperatures! We are wrapping up the month with a few more publications from our clients, and we couldn’t be happier with how many articles were published in 2016! Congratulations to everyone who was able to get it done this year, and we are looking… Read more »
December’s webcast will provide the Golden Helix community with a more in-depth look at CNV analysis in VarSeq. On December 7th, Dr. Nathan Fortier will discuss the challenges and metrics surrounding CNV detection and then demonstrate VarSeq’s new capability from VCF to clinical report. Wednesday, December 7th @ 12:00 PM, EST Numerous studies have documented the role of Copy Number Variations (CNVs)… Read more »
While clinical assessments of germline mutations have been collected in ClinVar under the stewardship of the NCBI and the collaborate effort of many testing labs, the same type of resource has been missing for mutations that could informal clinical care in Cancer. Or at least, that is what I thought until I started to work with CIViC. With the stewardship of… Read more »
This year we have added some very important features to our software including CNV calling in VarSeq and integrating our premium annotations into SVS. We have also made many improvements to our software’s performance so that you can handle growing datasets with relative ease. In an effort to thank our community for their support throughout the year, we are happy… Read more »
ASHG 2016 is in our rear mirror. Again, it was bigger and better than the previous year. The conference hosted over 9,000 visitors from 66 countries. This gave the event a level of vibrancy that was evenly matched by the wonderful ambiance of the city of Vancouver. Nestled in between the two conference centers was a little pier offering spectacular… Read more »
The new Annotate and Filter algorithm is now available with the release of SVS 8.6.0, see the release notes for full details on all new and updated features. To access this new functionality, you simply need to update your SVS installation to the new version. The update can be done by clicking the Update Available link at the bottom of… Read more »
It’s hard to believe that summer has already faded into fall and that ASHG 2016 is right around the corner! 2016 has been quite a busy year for us so far at Golden Helix. We have been working hard to bring our community the very best tools available for variant interpretation and SNP analysis. This year at ASHG, you can… Read more »
Many of our customers published throughout September using our SVS software, and we love sharing their work with you. There’s bound to be a topic among the wide variety we’ve highlighted here that will spark your interest! Maurico Arcos Burgos, Claudio Mastronardi and colleagues of the Australian National University published Mutations modifying sporadic Alzheimer’s disease age of onset in the American Journal of Medical… Read more »
Any validated bioinformatics pipeline must be continuously monitored. Quality management in clinical testing labs ensures that any divergence from predefined quality metrics during the analysis of clinical samples is investigated. For example: There is an insufficient number of sequence reads that passed the predefined base quality score threshold The number of variants identified in a data set may deviate substantially… 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 »
Wednesday, September 21st @ 12:00 pm EDT Every day, the trove of genomic data is growing. Clinics are sequencing targeted genes at high read depths to report out genetic tests. Research groups are adding new exomes and genomes to their disease-specific cohorts. Agricultural breeders are genotyping their herds and flocks by the thousands of thousands. The conventional attitude to big… Read more »
After the Wet Lab process has been completed, the bioinformatics analysis of the sequencing data work begins. The next three blogs will focus on three aspects of this process. The building blocks of a bioinformatics pipeline, documentation and validation (today’s topic) Quality Management Clinical Reporting The Building Blocks of an NGS PipelineThe bioinformatics process to analyze NGS data occurs in three… Read more »
For many of you this might be a busy week with school starting up again! However, even though school is just starting, many of our customers have been publishing all summer long. Here are a few highlights from our most recent publications this August: Evaline Ibeagha-Awemu and Xin Zhao of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, along with colleagues, published High density genome wide… Read more »
Question: Now that I’ve added annotation sources for my sample, filtered down to a list of interesting variants, flagged those variants and generated a clinical report, can I save or copy the annotation sources and filters for use on another sample? Short Answer: Yes! Long Answer: VarSeq was created with ease and efficiency in mind. In VarSeq, once you’ve defined… Read more »
Every month hundreds of clinicians and researchers access the variety of free resources on the Golden Helix website. Our resource library hosts eBooks, webcasts and tutorials to keep the community apprised of new methods, informed on best practices and to help our customers get the most out of their software purchase. Here is a list of the 5 most watched webcasts… Read more »