Clinical Genetics

Golden Helix gets full marks in ClinGen’s list of Genomic Analysis Software Platforms

Aug 26, 2020

The potential of genetic testing to impact a patient’s life has been greatly accelerated by the sharing of variant interpretations done by clinical labs in public repositories such as ClinVar. This is not an inevitable outcome, but the persistent work and advocacy of people like Dr. Heidi Rehm and organizations…

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Golden Helix’s End-to-End Architecture for Clinical Testing Labs

Dec 19, 2019

As clinical genetic tests have been adopted as a critical enabler of precision medicine, the number of tests offered by clinical labs and the volume of tested patients has grown by orders of magnitude in the past five years. The Gene Testing Registry, managed by the NIH, documented a rise…

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Variant Interpretation with VSClinical: Evaluation of an X-linked Recessive Mutation

May 21, 2019

Overview VSClinical enables users to evaluate variants according to the ACMG guidelines in a high-throughput fashion and obtain consistent results and accurate variant interpretations. This feature is tightly integrated into our VarSeq platform as well, and when paired together, users can evaluate NGS data and obtain clinical reports all in…

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Variant Interpretation with VSClinical: Clinical Example for Congenital Indifference to Pain

May 16, 2019

VSClinical provides a rapid-fire way to investigate any variant’s impact by following the ACMG Guidelines process for classification. We will be demonstrating this by looking at interesting examples of rare disorders and showcasing some evaluation steps users may deploy in their analysis. Our first example in this blog series is…

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Using GRCh38 for Clinical Interpretation: Now Possible with Our Custom LiftOver Tracks

Jan 23, 2018

There are many good reasons why the pursuit of the highest quality genomic interpretation would lead you to the latest human reference. It is more complete and fixes incorrect or partially missing genes that have known implications for human disease. While most major projects cataloging human populations have plans to…

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Revisiting the Five Splice Site Algorithms used in Clinical Genetics

Jan 16, 2018

Interpretation of variants in accordance with the ACMG guidelines requires that variants near canonical splice boundaries be evaluated for their potential to disrupt gene splicing [1]. The five most common tools for splice site detection are NNSplice, MaxEntScan, GeneSplicer, HumanSplicingFinder, and SpliceSiteFinder-like. Because these algorithms have been made easily accessible…

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Case Study: iTARGET Autism Project

Oct 3, 2017

Dr. Suzanne Lewis is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics at University of British Columbia (UBC) and Senior Investigator at British Columbia Children’s Hospital Research Institute (BCCHR), Vancouver, Canada. She is also the Chair of the iTARGET Autism Project and Vice-Chair of Autism Canada Chief Medical Officer…

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Clinical Workflows Webcast Q&A

Jul 13, 2017

In case you missed our live event yesterday, I wanted to share the Q&A session and a link to the webcast recording: An Exploration of Clinical Workflows in VarSeq. Question:You mentioned saving projects as templates, will it save GenomeBrowse plots in the project template or do you have to replot the…

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CNV Caller Updates and More with VarSeq 1.4.5

Jun 22, 2017

We have been heads down doing the detailed and careful work to improve our CNV caller algorithm in the past three months since our we launched our Exome capable CNV caller and are very excited about the massive step forward we have made with the VarSeq 1.4.5 release. Additionally, we…

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Annotating with gnomAD: Frequencies from 123,136 Exomes and 15,496 Genomes

May 16, 2017

Annotating with gnomAD: Frequencies from 123,136 Exomes and 15,496 Genomes When the Broad Institute team lead by Dan MacArthur announced at ASHG 2016 that the successor to the popular ExAC project (frequencies of 61,486 exomes) was live at http://gnomad.broadinstitute.org/, I thought their servers would have a melt-down as everyone immediately…

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Updating VarSeq’s Transcript Annotation along with NCBI RefSeq Genes Interim Release

Mar 30, 2017

It may be possible to say that annotating a variant correctly and accurately against gene transcripts is the most important job of a variant annotation and interpretation tool. We take it very seriously at Golden Helix as we support VarSeq and its use by our customers in both research and…

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Massive Variant Boost to ClinVar & PubMed Citation Fields

Jan 24, 2017

It may have been easy to miss in the drum-beat of monthly annotation updates we do here at Golden Helix, but there are a couple of things that are very special about the January update to the ClinVar database: We added new fields including HGVS names of variants and citations…

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Case Study: Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

Dec 6, 2016

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…

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Annotating Cancer Mutations with CIViC

Nov 15, 2016

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…

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Why Call CNVs: Getting More from your NGS Data

Oct 11, 2016

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…

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CADD Scores: Rank and Filter in Harmony!

May 19, 2016

There used to be much energy expended at conferences, bioinformatics forums and even publications about what was the better strategy for interpreting variants of clinical significance: Rule-based filtering and classification mechanisms or rank-based prioritization through all-encompassing “pathogenicity” scores. Both have shown to be effective. Rule-based systems, as exemplified in this…

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N-of-One Integration comes to VSReports

Apr 28, 2016

Submit directly to N-of-One from VarSeq If you or your lab uses N-of-One solutions for clinical annotations, here’s some good news: You can now submit directly to N-of-One from VarSeq! N-of-One’s set of preferred transcripts may differ from those outputted by our algorithms in VarSeq, so our solution was built…

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Clinical Reports – New & Improved Templates!

Apr 14, 2016

Clinical reports come in all shapes, sizes and flavors. With that in mind, our clinical reporting interface VSReports was built to be highly customizable and flexible.  With a little Javascript and HTML know-how, your clinical reports can be customized to meet the needs and goals of your lab. With a little…

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Quality Assurance Sample Statistics Added To VarSeq

Feb 18, 2016

As VarSeq continues its adoption amongst clinical labs and researchers looking for reproducible workflows for variant annotation, filtering and interpretation, we have continued to prioritize the addition of features to assess the quality of the upstream data at a variant, coverage and now sample level. The  Importance of Quality Assurance Sample prep…

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Q&A from the VSWarehouse Launch Webcast

Feb 4, 2016

Yesterday, it was my pleasure to share in a live webcast our integrated solution for genetic data warehousing, VSWarehouse. Although we had a great set of questions at the end of our presentation, we didn’t have time to answer all of them, so here is a selection of the remaining representative…

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