It’s that time of year again. The mornings are chilly, the leaves are falling, and ASHG is right around the corner. This year will mark my very first ASHG and I am really looking forward to meeting some of the Golden Helix community! The team has been hard at work preparing for a great conference and I wanted to give you… Read more »
I’m sitting in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum basking in the incredible product of human innovation and the hard work of countless engineers. My volunteer tour guide started us off at the Wright brother’s fliers and made a point of saying it was only 65 years from lift off at Kitty Hawk to the landing of a man on the moon…. Read more »
You probably haven’t spent much time thinking about how we represent genes in a genomic reference sequence context. And by genes, I really mean transcripts since genes are just a collection of transcripts that produce the same product. But in fact, there is more complexity here than you ever really wanted to know about. Andrew Jesaitis covered some of this… Read more »
Earlier this year we completed the marriage of SVS and GenomeBrowse. When we released Version 8 of SVS we completed a major engineering task. A lot of things under the hood of both products had been changed to create a seamless experience for our users. The new and improved SVS platform is based on a technology stack that allows us… Read more »
“Who has ever had a bad experience with a VCF file?” I like to ask that question to the audience when I present data analysis workshops for Golden Helix. The question invariably draws laughter as many people raise their hands in the affirmative. It seems that just about everybody who has ever worked VCF files has encountered some sort of… Read more »
Last month, June 2014, we announced a new method that Golden Helix developed–the soon to be available MM-KBAC. MM-KBAC, or Mixed Model Kernel Based Adaptive Clustering combines the KBAC method developed by Lui and Leal (2010) with a random effects matrix to adjust for relationships between samples. The KBAC algorithm takes a binary dependent variable and transformations are used to convert… Read more »
We released GenomeBrowse 2.0 earlier this year, allowing users to review all types of genomic data. Since then, it has received rave reviews from thousands of users around the world. Essentially, it’s the Google Earth app for genomic data. GenomeBrowse allows a user to sift through vast amounts of genomic data, and make it easy to focus on a single part… Read more »
The developers at Golden Helix have raised the bar again with the release of GenomeBrowe 2.0. About a year and a half after the initial release, Golden Helix has expanded the functionality of GenomeBrowse to fulfill feature requests from both fundamental research investigators and translational scientists who require a visualization tool to gain key insight into their results. The Golden… Read more »
Today is a big day for us. Today we are announcing a major release of our flagship product, SNP & Variation Suite (SVS), to the general public. SVS 8 is a substantial improvement over the previous release in a number of dimensions (see detailed discussion on our What’s New page). We’ve come a long way. Over five years ago, in… Read more »
Weather.com currently says it feels like -24 degrees outside (yes, that’s negative) here in Bozeman, Montana. Which is why I’m more than a little jealous of Gabe Rudy and Andreas Scherer who get to go to San Francisco and Marco Island next week, respectively, where the weather is little more… well, let’s say… reasonable. Andreas will be headed to Marco… Read more »
Last week, we presented a webcast on Workflow Automation in SVS. If you were unable to attend, a recording of it is on our website. In this post I’ll respond to some of the questions we were unable to answer within the allotted time. Will you provide a link for the software used in the webcast? I used Golden Helix’s… Read more »
Last week Khanh-Nhat Tran-Viet, Manager/Research Analyst II at Duke University, presented the webcast: Insights: Identification of Candidate Variants using Exome Data in Ophthalmic Genetics. (That link has the recording if you are interested in viewing.) In it, Khanh-Nhat highlighted tools available in SVS that might be under used or were recently updated. These tools were used in his last three… Read more »
As a senior studying statistics at Montana State University, I was fortunate to be granted the opportunity to intern with the development team at a local software company. I was even more fortunate when this internship turned into full-time employment after I graduated. Working on a team with extremely talented individuals, I realized the significant impact our company makes through… Read more »
Happy new year! We hope all of our readers, clients, and users had a great holiday season filled with friends and family! While Golden Helix did take a break from blogging in December, we’ve still been pretty busy bringing you new and exciting things. We’re pleased to announce the addition of genome maps and annotation tracks for two new plant… Read more »
Since Dr. Ken Kaufman gave his webcast on Identifying Candidate Functional Polymorphisms in SVS, we’ve been working with Dr. Kaufman to simplify and automate many of the steps in his workflow. I touched on this in my last blog post, and I’m excited to report that with Ken’s help, we’ve been able to simplify the workflow even more. In particular… Read more »
Last month I was inspired to create a new way to keep our customers apprised of the latest information on Golden Helix software without cluttering inboxes and overwhelming our blog. I happened to receive a link to an article for one of Illumina’s bulletins and realized that was exactly what we needed at Golden Helix as well! On Wednesday, we… Read more »
There is nothing cooler than having something arrive that you have been excitedly waiting for: last week I got an email notification that my 23andMe exome results were ready. Actually, I got 3 emails that my exome results were ready. You see, I lucked out. It all began two years ago on DNA day when Hacker News reported that 23andMe… Read more »
Recently I gave a presentation on bioinformatic filtering: the process of using quality scores, annotation databases, and functional prediction scores to intelligently and quickly reduce your variant search space. In this webcast, I mention that filtering is something we have been doing for a long time, and that there are some great examples that use exome sequencing data along with… Read more »
As Product Quality Manager, I have been spending quite a bit of time lately thinking about the best way to communicate with our Golden Helix customers with regards to product quality and customer support issues. Most of our customers at this point have already seen several emails from me this year! Email is certainly one way to get an announcement… Read more »
My work in the GHI analytical services department gives me the opportunity to handle data from a variety of sources. I have learned over time that every genotyping platform has its own personality. Every time we get data from a new chip, I tend to learn something new about the quirks of genotyping technology. I usually discover these quirks the… Read more »
