Author Archives: Rana Smalling

About Rana Smalling

Rana Smalling, PhD joined our team as a Field Application Scientist in September of 2021. Rana is a Jamaican native who is passionate about using biomedical research and science communication to bring about better healthcare solutions. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Chicago, a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Utah and completed postdoctoral research at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She has used both lab bench and bioinformatics approaches to identify novel regulators and potential biomarkers in cancer and metabolic diseases. Rana enjoys providing support and training to Golden Helix customers. When she is not working, she likes to learn about the medicinal uses of plants, fungi and microbes, and she enjoys road trips, singing and listening to music.

Efficient Quality Control tools for an automated VarSeq pipeline

         October 29, 2024

Optimizing sample throughput while maintaining quality control is, arguably, the crux of any profitable lab performing a high volume of analysis. We’ve discussed in great detail the flexibility of VSPipeline, our command line automation tool, as well as our full-stack FASTQ to report automation capabilities, and today I’d like to further elucidate on how QC methods fit into the picture…. Read more »

Compound Heterozygosity Between Variant Classes

         October 4, 2024

Compound heterozygosity describes the relationship between two alternate alleles when they are located within the same gene but at different loci within that gene. Compound heterozygosity is particularly relevant in a recessive disorder when the presence of these alleles in combination confers an increased risk of disease, similar to a traditional homozygous recessive combination of alleles. The detection of compound… Read more »

Webcast Q & A: Integrating Long and Short Read Sequencing for Comprehensive NGS Analysis

         August 22, 2024

Our webcast on Integrating Long and Short Read Sequencing for Comprehensive NGS Analysis was a timely review of a topic. We discussed how users are leveraging both short and long-read sequencing modalities for comprehensive NGS analyses, reviewing the differences between long and short-read sequencing, the benefits and limitations of each modality, and how they complement each other. The theme was how… Read more »

Demystifying the Representation of Structural Variants Imported into VarSeq

         May 20, 2024

VarSeq enables users to import structural variants for annotation, filtration, and subsequent clinical or other analyses. Structural variants are often called during secondary analysis as belonging to two broad categories – Copy Number Variants (CNVs) with the file suffix “…_CNV.vcf” and Breakends with the file suffix “…_SV.vcf”. This blog will give some insight into how structural variants are triaged when… Read more »

Couple Carrier Screening Tutorial and Onboarding Training Now Available!

         April 30, 2024

We are pleased to announce new training materials are available for multi-sample workflows in VarSeq! Specifically, we have a New Carrier Screening Tutorial and New Onboarding and Training guides for Carrier Screening Analysis in VarSeq, and Clinical Evaluation and Carrier Status Reporting in VSClinical. This blog gives an overview of what the user can expect to encounter when working through… Read more »

From the Inbox: Leveraging the Transparency and Flexibility of VSClinical for ACMG Guidelines

         March 19, 2024

When a variant shows up as rare in the general “healthy” population, as indicated by low frequency or absence in one or more commonly referenced population catalogs such as GnomAD Exomes or 1000 Genomes, this indicates by proxy that the variant may be pathogenic. However, several factors determine the frequency threshold below which a variant is considered rare enough to… Read more »

Managing Gene Preferences and Preferred Transcripts in VarSeq

         January 16, 2024

There are several contextual factors to consider when analyzing genomic data for NGS analyses. A variant may have divergent impacts depending on which transcript of the gene is being considered, or the impact of a variant could be weighed more or less heavily depending on the disease context. Evidently, the user’s gene preferences are very important, but not all software… Read more »

VarSeq Onboarding and Training Program Now Available!

         January 4, 2024

Get your year started off right with Golden Helix’s new VarSeq Onboarding and Training Program! Analysis of NGS data comes with several challenges, but mastery of the data analysis software does not have to be one of them. With this in mind, Golden Helix is pleased to announce that VarSeq Onboarding and Training tools are now available to all our… Read more »

Choosing Bin Sizes for the VarSeq CNV Binned Caller

         September 14, 2023

Detecting CNVs from whole genome data has a number of advantages but also unique challenges. Whole genomes offer a comprehensive and uniform picture of the entire genome, allowing a user to capture CNVs at a higher resolution than with data sequenced at a lesser scale. It also allows for the detection of structural variation over non-coding regions and for a… Read more »

VarSeq Assessment Catalogs for Beginners

         August 29, 2023

Variant interpretation is a critical aspect of any clinical NGS workflow. VarSeq assessment catalogs are a tool used to save variants and associated variant information for easy tracking and retrieval of completed variant interpretations. As variant interpretations stack up and classifications are saved, storing in assessment catalogs makes it easy to automatically fill in a previous interpretation if the variant… Read more »

Webcast Recap: Best Practices for Validating a Next-Gen Sequencing Workflow

         August 17, 2023

With the widespread adoption of next-generation sequencing for clinical and research applications comes the need for guidance and recommended standards and best practices for achieving accuracy and efficacy for each assay pipeline. The support team at Golden Helix has gotten a lot of hands-on experience in assisting users to build their bioinformatics workflows for NGS assays. We recently shared our… Read more »

Importing External Assessment Catalogs for use in VSClinical ACMG and VSClinical AMP

         July 13, 2023

When doing clinical variant analysis, it is often essential to keep track of the variants that are encountered in each sample, their pathogenic or oncogenic classifications, which individual created or saved an interpretation, and when. For this purpose, VarSeq prompts VSClinical users to create default assessment catalogs in which to store variants and other events. However, we are aware that… Read more »

When Negative Findings are a Good Thing to Report: Leveraging VarSeq’s VSClinical AMP

         May 25, 2023

Explore the importance of negative findings in genomic medicine through the lens of VarSeq’s VSClinical AMP. When analyzing a somatic sample in VarSeq, users have the option to report on several types of biomarkers with VSClinical AMP. In addition to your usual mutational biomarkers such as small variants, your copy number variants, and structural variants, we support the analysis of… Read more »

Managing the Scope of Somatic Variants Reported in VSClinical

         April 13, 2023
Managing the Scope of Somatic Variants Reported in VSClinical

Discover the power of VSClinical’s Interpretation Match Behavior options for managing the scope of somatic variants in cancer reporting, enabling clinical teams to make informed treatment decisions. Multiple interpretations can apply to a single biomarker or tumor type. In some circumstances, a clinical team may only want to report the most relevant and significant biomarker, treatment, diagnosis, or prognosis interpretations… Read more »

A New Comprehensive Template for Somatic Variant Annotation and Filtering in VarSeq

         February 2, 2023
A New Comprehensive Template for Somatic Variant Annotation and Filtering in VarSeq icon

Revolutionize Your Somatic Variant Analysis with Our Cutting-Edge Template for Annotation and Filtering in VarSeq Golden Helix is excited to share our new Comprehensive Cancer Template for somatic variant annotation and filtering, along with the latest version of our software VarSeq 2.3.0! Our latest VarSeq update was specifically focused on getting up to speed with multiple aspects of somatic variant… Read more »

Maximizing Cancer Care with Golden Helix CancerKB 2.0: Unveiling the Latest in Precision Medicine

         January 26, 2023
Maximizing Cancer Care with Golden Helix CancerKB 2.0 Unveiling the Latest in Precision Medicine icon

Our recent webcast, Maximizing the Benefits of Comprehensive Genomic Testing in Cancer Care with Golden Helix CancerKB 2.0, was an opportunity to unveil Golden Helix CancerKB v2.0. Our latest VarSeq release was designed to address the changing landscape of cancer genomics, and in this webcast, we discussed the application of our very own Golden Helix CancerKB in the context of… Read more »

Variant Normalization – Choosing When to Split Multinucleotide Variants Into Allelic Primitives.

         December 20, 2022

Variant normalization is essentially reducing the representation of a variant to its canonical representation. Variant normalization ensures that the way a variant is represented is parsimonious and left-aligned and can also refer to splitting variants into their allelic primitives. VarSeq normalizes variants by default, but we offer users the option to forego one or more aspects of variant normalization. This… Read more »

Streamlining Variant Analysis for Large Genetic Cohorts: Part 2

         November 29, 2022
Streamlining Variant Analysis for Large Genetic Cohorts: Part 2

The last blog in this series covered streamlining variant analysis for large genetic cohorts, namely case-control studies, on a single-project basis. The reality when dealing with big data is that you often do not handle a high volume project all at once. Therefore, we will follow up on the topic of cohort analysis by discussing Golden Helix’s solution for streamlining… Read more »

Streamlining Variant Analysis for Large Genetic Cohorts: Part 1

         September 27, 2022

Large genetic cohorts require substantial effort to analyze. Genetic researchers are increasingly turning to whole exome and whole genome sequencing analyses for their clinical diagnostics and research. However, with that approach comes the challenge of making sense of these massive datasets. This is especially challenging when looking for tools that can streamline variant analysis for large genetic cohorts and include… Read more »

Predicting the Functional Impact of Genetic Variants Using VarSeq

         August 9, 2022
Predicting the Functional Impact of Genetic Variants Using VarSeq

Large-scale next-generation sequencing studies are becoming increasingly popular clinical and research tools. One enduring challenge for interpretion of these large amounts of data has been predicting the functional impact of genetic variants. Access to efficient computational tools for predicting the functional impact of variants is crucial to prioritizing the most potentially relevant variants in a dataset in a time-efficient manner…. Read more »