It’s the big day, and you’ve spent hours preparing for the big old-fashioned family Thanksgiving. Keeping in mind that your Cousin Eddie likes to show up unannounced and eat you out of house and home, you have remembered our food allergy allele workflow from last year, and prepared a special menu. Right on time, Cousin Eddie arrives, family in tow…. Read more »
Reporting on Cancer Biomarkers may seem like a daunting task, both in determining the scope of what a biomarker can encompass and which information to include. Biomarkers can come in the form of small variants (SNPs and INDELs), copy number variants, and structural variants. Biomarkers can also be sourced from external cancer kits in the form of a Genomic Signature,… Read more »
Thank you to all our audience members who attended our recent webcast, Combined Impact: New Tools to Assess Complex and Compound Heterozygous Variants with VarSeq. If you would like to view the webcast, follow the link above! As the title suggests, this webcast was all about breaking down the new variant analysis tools in the upcoming VarSeq 2.6.2 release and… Read more »
Periodically, our FAS team will see a situation where a customer has installed VarSeq on a new machine…but something is not entirely right. Perhaps a VCF will not load, annotations cannot download, or a long-running process like coverage regions will not complete. Any of these issues alone can be tricky to troubleshoot, whether due to a permissions block, a lack… Read more »
Our customers asked for a step-by-step tutorial for navigating a pharmacogenomic (PGx) workflow in VarSeq, and we are happy to have it delivered! Our brand new PGx tutorial can be found on our website, along with our other VarSeq tutorials. You can also follow this link. Like our other famous tutorials, this one will provide example data, or you may… Read more »
In the last year, we have seen a surge in customers moving to whole genome sequencing. Not only does whole genome sequencing provide unparalleled gene coverage compared to whole exome, but depending on the kind of sequencing, you may expect to see additional file types as well. For example, our partners at PacBio will provide an additional VCF containing copy… Read more »
The recent release of VarSeq 2.6.0 was filled with so many customer-requested features (for example, our long-awaited PGx workflow!) that some of our other new features have not yet had their time in the spotlight. For this blog, we are thrilled to announce that with the release of VarSeq 2.6.0, we have made WGS CNV calling more user-friendly than ever… Read more »
Our customers often ask if they can include quality control metrics in their final reports. While which metrics you actually need to report may be unique to your lab, there are a variety of metrics that we can immediately render into a report, and even more that can be rendered with a few customizations. For help with any report modifications,… Read more »
There are many ways to optimize an individual workflow, from increasing the granularity of a filter chain to automating certain multi-stepped tasks. Although the best way to optimize an individual workflow is to book a session with our FAS team to talk about your unique use case, we wanted to highlight five ways a workflow can be optimized across most… Read more »
We at Golden Helix are thrilled with our recent release of gnomAD v4! The curation of this massive database was a huge undertaking for our development team, but with the addition of new features, we believe it was well worth the wait. This annotation track contains allele frequencies from a more diverse population than ever before, with the addition of… Read more »
Many thanks to those who came to view our most recent webcast, From Panels to Genomes with VarSeq: The Complete Tertiary Platform for Short and Long-Read NGS Data. This was a great opportunity for us to showcase the breadth of our workflows, from short-read to long-read, panels to genomes, singleton analysis to families. In this blog, we would like to… Read more »
How long did it take to run coverage regions? Did my colleague update the filter chain like he said he would? Which import options did I use? Where did I save this project? These questions and more can be answered with our little-used VarSeq Log tab. Periodically, our customers come to us with questions in the realm of record keeping,… Read more »
Thank you to all our viewers who attended our webcast last week on VarSeq 2.5.0: VSClinical AMP Workflow from the User Perspective. If you did not get a chance to attend but would still like to see the new upgrades to VarSeq 2.5.0, please visit our website here. Overall, this webcast highlighted the versatility of VarSeq, demonstrating both a Tumor-Normal… Read more »
The table is set, the football game is on in the background, and the family has gathered around the table when out of nowhere, your Cousin Eddie shows up for Thanksgiving dinner. While Cousin Eddie is known for eating anything, his allergies always get the best of him, ruining the evening. Thankfully, this year Cousin Eddie had recently gotten his… Read more »
It may come as a surprise to our long-standing users that the multi-allelic import and representation in VarSeq is slated to have different import options with the 2.5.0 upgrade. As the software grows and evolves, we strive to meet the changing needs of our users, and this is one area where an update was sorely needed. Before going into an… Read more »
Recently, a Golden Helix customer reached out to support for advice on how to validate the variant scoring between two different VarSeq users. Here we break down one possible solution as an opportunity to showcase the utility of both the Latest Sample Assessment function and an alternative way to leverage the Compute Fields function. To set up this validation project,… Read more »
Your variants of interest have been identified, the SVs annotated, and the CNVs classified. Once the manifest has been imported (and here is a great blog on the subject), the last step is to bring all of this information into a report template! In this blog, we will go over some simple report modifications and provide resources for more information… Read more »
The ability to import patient-level information into VarSeq and VSClinical can not only save time while evaluating a sample but can be a critical step in automating project creation through VSPipeline. Here we will review how to construct a basic text manifest and how to apply that manifest to a project. Those fields can then be rendered into the final… Read more »
Discover how to enhance collaboration in VSClinical by sharing variant scores and assessment catalogs through the strategic relocation of the AppData folder. A subtle but powerful utility of VSClinical concerns the ability to share variant scores between users on the same account. What I mean by that is, leveraging the location of the AppData folder, so that users are writing… Read more »
In recent weeks, GenomeBrowse capabilities have had a sudden resurgence of interest among our customers. To support this, the FAS team wanted to share with you several under-utilized GenomeBrowse plotting tricks. First, let’s cover plotting a BED file for easy track viewing. The first step is launching a GenomeBrowse window by clicking the + button and selecting GenomeBrowse (Figure 1)… Read more »
