Golden Helix Blog

Adding Population Catalogs to VSClinical

Dec 10, 2020

Our previous webcast demonstrated some of the new functionalities of VSClinical, including the ability to add ACMG frequency sources for the ACMG BA1, BS1, and PM2 criteria. This new feature was spurred by the feedback from our users, which requested supporting frequency tracks other than gnomAD Exomes and 1kG Phase3.…

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Webcast Recap: Exploring New Features and Clinical Reports in the ACMG Guideline Workflow

Dec 3, 2020

Webcast Recap In the recent webcast “Exploring New Features and Clinical Reports in the ACMG Guideline Workflow”, Gabe and I took viewers through an evaluation with CNVs and SNVs according to the ACMG Guidelines where we generated and customized a clinical report. Along the way, we highlighted many new features…

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Loss-of-Function Splice Variant in MTHFR

Nov 26, 2020

In this blog post, I will be analyzing a loss-of-function splice variant in MTHFR using VarSeq. In the search for clinically relevant variants contributing to rare disorders, efficient filtering strategies are an important step in eliminating disinteresting variants. VarSeq supports end-to-end rare disease analysis, from panel-level filtering to clinical variant…

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Webcast Follow-up: Evaluating CNVs with VSClinical’s New ACMG Guidelines

Nov 19, 2020

In our previous webcast, Evaluating CNVs with VSClinical’s New ACMG Guidelines, we focused on a CNV deletion (12:27715515-29628122×1) in which the patient had a known disorder called Brachydactyly type E. The CNV was isolated using our VS-CNV caller and applied to the ACMG CNV guidelines using the intuitive steps of…

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New Algorithm: Variants Matching Current Sample

Nov 12, 2020

Those of you who have been attending our recent webcasts have learned about our upcoming VarSeq release. A part of that release will be an additional algorithm that will annotate variants matching the current sample. If you are not familiar with these webcasts, here are several on-demand webcasts I recommend…

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Webcast Recap: Evaluation of CNVs with VSClinical’s New ACMG Guideline Workflow

Nov 10, 2020

In the webcast, Evaluation of Copy Number Variants with VSClinical’s New ACMG Guideline Workflow, we discussed how VSClinical implements Section 4 of the ACMG guidelines. Specifically, we focused on integrating literature and publications to assess the pathogenicity of a CNV event when there was a lack of dosage sensitivity information.…

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Updated Annotation: BRCA Exchange

Oct 30, 2020

Our team is regularly updating and curating annotations, most recently the BRCA Exchange. Breast cancer is known to occur in approximately 10% of the female population and if there is a damaging mutation in the breast cancer gene (BRCA), that rate increases to 65%. Understanding and managing hereditary cancer risk…

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Golden Helix’s Virtual 2020 Conference Booth

Oct 27, 2020

In lieu of conferences making the absolutely necessary decision to cancel this year’s conference, we created our Virtual 2020 Conference Booth! Even though it will never compare to the real deal, we hope you enjoy this blog post containing a few events we had planned this year. To start, let…

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Upcoming VS-CNV Update: CNV Event Reporting with ACMG Guidelines

Oct 22, 2020

Golden Helix is excited to release an upcoming VSClinical feature that allows users to analyze next-generation sequencing (NGS) CNV event reporting with ACMG guidelines. This feature will be the first in the NGS workspace to allow this capability and if you are curious about the functionalities you can get a…

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Example De Novo CNV in Cardiomyopathy Panel

Oct 20, 2020

In a recent webcast, users were exposed to some new features upcoming in the next release of VarSeq. In this update, we will use an example de Novo CNV in a cardiomyopathy panel in VarSeq. There is a long list of new tools and polishes to the software but one…

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Webcast Recap: A User’s Perspective: ACMG Guidelines for CNVs in VSClinical

Oct 16, 2020

Our previous webcast from VP Gabe Rudy in September exposed us to some fundamentals of this years’ updated Technical standards for the interpretation and reporting of constitutional copy-number variants: a joint consensus recommendation of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) and the Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen). This…

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Annotate Your VarSeq Projects with REVEL

Oct 6, 2020

Typically, researchers are looking for rare variants in their next-generation sequencing datasets. However, most of the nonsynonymous variants have unknown significance because there is an inherent difficulty in validating large numbers of rare variants or even detecting rare variants with high statistical power. In lieu of this issue, computational tools…

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VarSeq’s NGS Panel Workflow: COL4A2 Variant from an Intellectual Disability Panel

Oct 1, 2020

A common discussion with our customers includes the challenges with tertiary analysis of next-gen sequencing data. This is the stage where all data from gene panels, exome, or whole genome scale pass through filters to quickly isolate the clinically relevant variant contributing to a patient disorder. Golden Helix has recognized…

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Discoveries in Human Medicine Continue Amid the Ongoing Pandemic

Sep 29, 2020

As the world is consumed by the ongoing pandemic, it is easy to forget that there are investigators all around the globe that continue to make important discoveries in human medicine. Below are a few examples that remind us there are those that persevere in their chosen fields of study…

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Controlling Your Preferred Transcripts for Clinical Interpretation

Sep 24, 2020

Did you know you can control your preferred transcript settings for clinical interpretation in VSClinical? Your lab is analyzing the DNA of a tissue sample from a patient with small cell lung cancer. The lab technician has imported the patient data into VSClinical to detect clinically relevant variants and evaluate…

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Advanced Plotting Capabilities with GenomeBrowse

Sep 22, 2020

In this blog update, I’ll be walking you through some of the advanced plotting capabilities with GenomeBrowse. The strategy with any next-gen sequencing analysis is to filter down to interesting variants for either research or clinical conclusion. Golden Helix produces powerful software specifically tailored for this efficient and comprehensive search…

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Variant Analysis of Bechet Disease Using VSClinical

Sep 15, 2020

VSClinical is a feature to evaluate clinically relevant variants according to the ACMG or AMP guidelines. This feature can also be used to identify if a variant has been observed previously or evaluate a manually inserted variant. Take, for example, the scenario where a colleague is interested to see if…

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Webcast Recap: VSClinical: First Commercial Product to Integrate the Updated ACMG Guidelines for CNVs

Sep 15, 2020

In our recent webcast announcing the upcoming release of VarSeq VSClinical and the implementation of the ACMG guidelines for NGS CNVs, we had a number of live questions we didn’t get a chance to cover at the end of the presentation. I will follow up on those questions in this blog post. But first,…

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2020 T-Shirt Design Competition Winners

Sep 8, 2020

We would like to thank everyone who participated in our 2020 t-shirt design competition. It was great to see the amount of creativity our community expressed and was certainly a tough decision to make! We are pleased to announce this year’s winners: First Place – Michaela Lucas Michaela Lucas is…

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Updates to dbSNP 154 v2

Sep 3, 2020

In the 1990s the genetic industry voiced a request for a variant catalog that incorporates associated variant information such as phenotypic and metabolic pathways. The call was answered by NCBI, which created dbSNP; dbSNP became publicly available in 1998 and around 1.5 million variants. Fast forward to the present and…

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