This Saturday, Plant & Animal Genome (PAG) XXV will kick off in sunny San Diego! Here in Montana, we have had a brutally cold winter thus far. I, like many of you, am looking forward to San Diego’s sunny, warm temperatures! Since last year’s PAG, SVS has had a number of updates including the integration of BEAGLE for imputation (coming soon!),… Read more »
Golden Helix closed out 2016 with a great honor; in December, The Silicon Review Magazine released a special edition naming Golden Helix as one of the fastest-growing technology companies for 2016. You can read the interview with our CEO, Andreas Scherer, Ph.D, here: Delivering industry-leading analytic software and services. We continue to believe that our customers are paramount in this honor, as… Read more »
Our webcast series for 2017 is starting off by giving the Golden Helix community their first look at our addition of genotype imputation into SVS! On Wednesday, January 11th, Gabe Rudy will discuss how users can now run their genotype phasing and imputation on human and animal data as part of their SVS analytics workflow. Wednesday, January 11th @ 12:00 PM, EST Genotype imputation… 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 »
Variant interpretation is an integral part of any workflow that results in some decisions being made about the validity and suspected functional impact of a variant in a given sample and their presenting phenotypes. The VarSeq Assessment Catalog functionality is designed to assist the VarSeq user in streamlining this process. To include this functionality in your workflow, you will first… Read more »
ExAC CNVs were released publicly with a recent publication, providing the full set of rare CNVs called on ~60K human exomes. While there are many public CNV databases out there, this is the first one that was derived from exome data, and thus includes both extremely rare and very small CNV events. With the recent release of Golden Helix’s CNV calling… Read more »
Dr. Laura Li and her colleagues at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) are working to determine the underlying genetic causes of Optic Nerve Hypoplasia (ONH), which is still unclear. ONH is the absence or under-development of the optic nerve and is currently the leading ocular cause of vision impairments and blindness in young children. ONH can also be combined… 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 »
True to its nature, VarSeq offers multiple data export options. You can export result tables from VarSeq to Text, VCF, a VarSeq annotation file and most importantly an XLSX (Excel) File. VarSeq’s Excel export options provide a lot of flexibility in the information that is exported and preserve the formatting of data during the export process from VarSeq to Excel. This… 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 »
One of the tools at the top of the toolbox for researchers working with microarray data is genotype imputation. Genotype imputation is the process of inferring the genotype of one or more markers based on the correlation pattern (aka linkage disequilibrium or LD) of the surrounding markers for which genotypes are known. We have now integrated a natively ported version of BEAGLE into Golden… Read more »
This month’s webcast, Agrigenomics 2.0 – Advanced Analysis to Accelerate Discovery, will feature two well known Agrigenomic researchers and long-time Golden Helix customers, Christopher Seabury of Texas A&M and Holly Neiburgs of Washington State University. These two will join our own Gabe Rudy for a look at advanced workflows in SVS to advance mammalian genetic research. We hope you can join us! Wednesday,… 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 »
Dr. Sergey Kornilov, a Duncan Scholar in Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine, combines his broad psychology background with genetics to research the genetic basis of neurodevelopmental disorders with a unique dual perspective. Neuro-developmental disorders, for example, those of the spoken and written language, affect many worldwide – up to 10% of preschool children. In most cases, these… 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 »
Copy Number Variants have been important to clinical genetics for quite a while now. So, what has made now the right time to be looking at calling CNVs from NGS data? Well, there are a number of good reasons. The dominant one is simply that the NGS data you are already creating for calling variants can be used in many cases… Read more »
Copy Number Variations (CNVs) play an important role in human health and disease, and the detection of CNVs in clinical samples has the potential to improve clinical diagnoses and inform treatment decisions. Yet until now, if you wanted to have CNVs on your targeted gene samples, you would need an alternative assay such as Chromosomal Microarrays (CMAs). In this webcast,… Read more »
Gabe Rudy’s webcast yesterday, Big Data at Golden Helix: Scaling to Meet the Demand of Clinical and Research Genomics, was a huge success with well over 300 registered. In today’s blog post, I wanted to recap the Q&A session with Gabe. If you missed the webcast, check it out! Question: What is the end goal for an application like Warehouse? Answer: The… 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 »
