Best Practices in Genetic Analysis

VS-CNV: Golden Helix’s Solution to Replace Traditional Methods

Dec 17, 2019

Copy Number Variation (CNV) is a type of structural variation in which sections of the genome are duplicated or deleted. Although CNV events are rare in the human population, constituting approximately 10% of the human genome, they are also associated with being causal mutations for disease phenotypes. Because of this,…

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Clinical Variant Analysis: Part V

Mar 5, 2019

Examples of Clinical Variant Interpretation with VSClinical In this chapter, I’d like to go through a few examples for variants that have been classified with the help of VSClinical. This will give you a better understanding of how data sources are actually being represented in the software and how those…

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Clinical Variant Analysis: Part IV

Feb 28, 2019

Rules for Combining Various Classification Criteria Now that we have a solid understanding of how the various criteria are meant to be applied, it’s time to look at how the evidence collectively leads to the clinical categorization of a variant. Let’s go through the rule framework for combining the various…

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Clinical Variant Analysis: Part III

Feb 26, 2019

Clinical Variant Analysis – Classification Criteria of Benign Variants The classification of benign variants is overall simpler and more straightforward, with the majority of benign variants being eliminated through allele frequency in various population catalogs. BA1 If a variant is common in one or more population catalog, as indicated by…

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Clinical Variant Analysis: Part II

Feb 25, 2019

Clinical Variant Analysis – Classification Criteria of Pathogenic Variants The ACMG Guidelines are utilized for the interpretation of variants. They are primarily applied to diagnose suspected inherited (primarily Mendelian) disorders in a clinical diagnostic laboratory setting. While evaluating variants no matter what the origin, it is important to distinguish between variants…

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Top-Quality GWAS Analysis: Part I

Jan 16, 2019

Importance of Quality in Association Tests SVS is a research application platform provided by Golden Helix that enables an array of computational analyses including genome-wide association studies (GWAS). GWAS is an observational study that can provide insight into the association of genetic variants with traits and complex disorders. The foundation…

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Optimized Breeding Selection via Genomic Prediction

Dec 11, 2018

What is Genomic Prediction? Genomic prediction is an algorithm widely used to improve desirable phenotypic traits in agriculture. For example, the cattle industry uses genomic prediction to improve beef quality and palatability as well as improve dairy production (1,2). By using genomic prediction, researchers can minimize multiple expenses in breeding…

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GRCh38 Liftover: Ensuring Top Quality Variant Analysis

Nov 27, 2018

In a recent webcast, our VP of Product and Engineering Gabe Rudy gave us insight into the current capability and benefits to lifting over to the GRCh38 assembly. Golden Helix fully supports this transition into the most recent reference assembly and have developed our tools on both the 38 and…

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VSClinical Best Practice Workflows: Part I

Nov 13, 2018

VSClinical is our most recent product that allows users to evaluate variants according to the ACMG guidelines. As with any tertiary analysis, there is a need to implement best practices into your workflow and using VSClinical for the ACMG guidelines is no exception. That said, we have put together a…

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Top Webcasts of 2017

Jan 9, 2018

2017 was an incredibly prosperous year for Golden Helix; we released a handful of new features, announced new partnerships and completed our end-to-end architecture for clinical testing labs. Our webcast series has become a very popular way for our community to stay up-to-date with our new capabilities and best practices…

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Annotation Education Series: Clinical Assessment Tracks

Sep 21, 2017

Clinical Assessment Tracks Golden Helix provides a large catalog of annotation sources for our research and clinical clientele. Making these public data repositories available to all our users is no easy task. As Cody Sarrazin mentioned in his blog post, annotation curation is a complex data science pipeline. This process…

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Secondary Analysis 2.0 – Part V

Aug 22, 2017

An Example of an Integrated Clinical Workflow for CNVs and SNVs In this blog series, I discuss the architecture of a state of the art secondary pipeline that is able to detect single nucleotide variations (SNVs) and copy number variations (CNVs) in one test leveraging next-gen sequencing. In Part I, we…

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Secondary Analysis 2.0 – Part IV

Aug 15, 2017

Examples of CNV Calling What do CNV calls actually look like? What are some of the key metrics to determine an event? Part IV of the Secondary Analysis 2.0 blog series will answer these questions by walking through some examples of how our CNV caller, VS-CNV, identifies CNVs. Golden Helix…

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Secondary Analysis 2.0 – Part III

Aug 8, 2017

Detection of CNVs in NGS Data Our secondary analysis 2.0 blog series continues with Part III: Detection of CNVs in NGS Data. We will give you an overview of some design principles of a CNV analysis framework for next-gen sequencing data. CNV detection is one of the more nuanced challenges…

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Secondary Analysis 2.0 – Part II

Aug 1, 2017

In this blog series, I will discuss the architecture of a state of the art secondary pipeline that is able to detect single nucleotide variations (SNV) and copy number variations (CNV) in one test leveraging next-gen sequencing. Modern NGS analysis pipelines integrate these steps to efficiently process high-throughput sequencing data.…

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Secondary Analysis 2.0 – Part I

Jul 18, 2017

Human genetic variation makes us unique. On average, humans are to 99.9% similar to each other. Understanding in detail what the nature of the difference in our genetic make-up is all about allows us to assess health risks, and eventually enables Precision Medicine as we determine treatment choices. Furthermore, it…

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Paying Attention to the Quality Fields in ExAC: A Case Study

Mar 7, 2017

In the past couple of weeks, the topic of the Filter and Quality fields in the popular ExAC population catalog has come up a number of times in discussions around NGS analysis software workflows. It turns out that unlike the 1000 Genomes project, which decided to very heavily filter their…

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PhoRank in SVS: Gene Ranking for Your Research Genotypes

Feb 9, 2017

Since we released our Phenotype Gene Ranking algorithm in VarSeq, it has become a staple of the way people conduct their analysis. It allows for a combination of filtering with ranking to prioritize follow-up interpretations of analysis results. Our PhoRank algorithm will be available in our upcoming SVS release to…

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GWAS 3.0

Feb 7, 2017

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…

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ExAC CNVs: The First Large Scale Public Exome CNV Variant Set

Dec 8, 2016

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…

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