Software Update

What Your VarSeq Upgrade Won’t Tell You

Jul 30, 2026

Why Every New Customer Starts on VarSeq 3 Today, every new Golden Helix customer starts on VarSeq 3, our clinical variant analysis platform, and for good reason: sharper structural variant handling, a rebuilt assessment catalog system built to scale with years of clinical data, refined annotation, and a stronger reporting…

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Introducing VarSeq 3.0.0: Faster, Smarter, Fully Integrated with VSWarehouse 3

Nov 7, 2025

VarSeq 3.0.0 is officially here, and it’s one of our most significant releases yet! The headline feature of this update is full integration with VSWarehouse 3, including a new login system that supports both single-user mode and server-managed authentication. Users can now choose to work locally or seamlessly store projects…

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Integrating Genomenon Mastermind Curated Variants in VarSeq and VSClinical

Sep 23, 2025

When performing variant classification using VarSeq’s ACMG classifier, a large number of variants inevitably fall into the category of variants of uncertain significance (VUS). This is because much of the evidence required for confident classification cannot be programmatically evaluated. Take PS3, for example, the criterion for functional evidence. This criterion…

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VarSeq 3.0.0 to Bring a Major Overhaul to Assessment Catalogs

Sep 2, 2025

We’re thrilled to announce that VarSeq 3.0.0 is right around the corner, and with it comes one of the most exciting updates yet: a complete reimagining of the Assessment Catalogs system. Whether you’re curating clinically relevant variants, tracking tumor-specific calls, or building rich catalogs of sample information, the new system…

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The Breakend Catalog Format for VarSeq 3

Jul 8, 2025

New to VarSeq 3 is support for breakend catalogs. Breakends represent the junction points of structural variants, which include complex genomic rearrangements like translocations, inversions, and large deletions that play crucial roles in cancer genomics and rare disease analysis. These catalogs are unique as they must save two genomic positions…

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Visualizing Base Modifications in Long-Read Alignment Files

Jun 19, 2025

We’re excited to announce a powerful new feature in GenomeBrowse that enhances our support for visualizing long-read sequencing data: the ability to color reads by base modifications, such as DNA methylation, directly from BAM and CRAM alignment files. Long-read sequencing technologies like those from PacBio and Oxford Nanopore have unlocked…

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Visualization With IGV

Jun 5, 2025

Modern genomics workflows often require multiple specialized tools working in concert. In the upcoming VarSeq release, we are excited to announce the option for tighter integration with IGV. Genomics researchers and clinicians are well-versed in using IGV as a visualization tool for their genomic data. This new option will allow…

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Golden Helix Launches Enterprise Genomic Analysis with VarSeq 3 and VSWarehouse 3

May 22, 2025

Today, we announced the release of VarSeq 3 and VSWarehouse 3, marking a major milestone in enterprise-scale secondary and tertiary genomic analysis. The release introduces cloud-native deployment options optimized for AWS and Azure, expanded support for hybrid and on-premise support, flexible licensing models, including per-sample packaging tailored to small and…

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Sample Catalogs in VSWarehouse 3

Apr 17, 2025

Creating and managing sample manifest files in VarSeq has traditionally been a time-consuming process that demands precision and attention to detail. The upcoming VSWarehouse 3 release will feature the ability to use catalogs to save and load sample fields in VarSeq projects. Not only will this allow for easy population…

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Custom Applications in VSWarehouse 3: Running IGV Genome Browser from the Cloud

Apr 3, 2025

VSWarehouse 3 (VSW3) is a powerful genomic data warehousing solution that gives laboratories full control over their cloud deployments while ensuring security and flexibility. One of its most exciting new features is the ability to run custom applications directly from the browser. This means that users can launch specialized tools…

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The VSWarehouse 3 End-User Experience: Improvements In All the Right Places

Mar 4, 2025

Clinical variant analysis experts with fully integrated workflows are often hesitant to upgrade or migrate their workspace, and rightly so. Similarly, those looking for new next-generation sequencing analysis software, whether for secondary (alignment and variant-calling) or tertiary (variant annotation, filtration, interpretation, and reporting) analysis, can be easily daunted by the…

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Bringing Variant Analysis to your Browser with VSWarehouse 3

Dec 12, 2024

In our recent post on VSWarehouse 3, we discussed how our comprehensive workflow system streamlines genomic analysis pipelines by directly integrating with your existing cloud infrastructure. Today, we will explore how you can use VarSeq to analyze the data produced by these workflows directly in your browser. Bringing VarSeq to…

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VSWarehouse 3 as an Integration Platform

Dec 5, 2024

Following up on our recent post about VSWarehouse 3’s Bring Your Own Cloud capabilities, we wanted to dive deeper into one of its most powerful features: our comprehensive workflow system. Built on our genomic warehouse platform, this system is designed to streamline genomic analysis pipelines while providing flexible integration with…

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VarSeq 2.6.2 is Released!

Oct 8, 2024

I am pleased to announce that VarSeq 2.6.2 is now available! VarSeq 2.6.2 comes jammed-packed with new features and capabilities to advance your NGS analysis workflows. In this blog, I will describe the major changes to the VSPGx workflow, which were the main focus of the release, and I will…

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VarSeq Early Capabilities for Analyzing DNA Methylation

Sep 12, 2024

DNA methylation is becoming more relevant as a clinically important biomarker, and long-read pipelines are making it easy to get this information in the same sequencing run as small variants and larger structural variants. Even though there are no official guidelines for addressing DNA methylation, it is still useful to…

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Collapse Phased Variants in VarSeq

Sep 12, 2024

In a recent blog post, we explored how phased genotypes provide crucial insights by separating variants into distinct haplotypes—groups of alleles inherited together from a single parent. We also discussed how the combined impact of multiple variants within the same gene can significantly differ from their individual effects. However, accurately…

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Sneak Peek: Force Calling Reference Alleles

Sep 3, 2024

In the upcoming release of VarSeq 2.6.2, we have added the ability to force call reference alleles using the BAM files associated with the sample. This feature extends the current force call functionality, which allows filling in reference alleles from GVCFs. This is an important option to enable when running…

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CNV Specific Updates to VarSeq 2.6.0

May 6, 2024

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,…

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VarSeq PGx inputs: Converting Microarray data to VCF format

Apr 3, 2024

The release of VarSeq version 2.6.0 provides many new features. Most notably is our support for tertiary analysis of Pharmacogenomic (PGx) data. VarSeq not only calls the necessary gene diplotypes for your PGx panels but also handles large batches of samples from the called diplotypes to final report on drug…

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VarSeq 2.6.0 is Released!

Mar 26, 2024

We have been building up to the final release of VarSeq 2.6.0 for a couple of weeks now, but we are excited to announce that 2.6.0 is officially available! VarSeq 2.6.0 is an exciting release as this version of VarSeq features the introduction of VSPGx, offering a complete pharmacogenomic workflow,…

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