Golden Helix Blog

New and Updated Annotations

Dec 7, 2017

Golden Helix is excited to announce a new round of novel and updated annotations; including a frequency track, a region track, and a gene track. All three of these tracks were created with the use of VarSeq and its Convert Wizard functionality. First, the expansive 1000 genomes track (1kG) has…

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VSWarehouse Updates with the Power of VarSeq 1.4.7

Nov 30, 2017

With the recent release of VarSeq 1.4.7, we have expanded the concepts of our popular assessment catalog to include CNV and other region-based records and not just variants. To match these capabilities, we have made a major update to VSWarehouse that supports these new record types in the centrally hosted…

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Annotation Education Series: CNV Annotations

Nov 9, 2017

With the recent upgrade to VarSeq 1.4.7, users gain access to some new great features. Among the additions are new CNV annotations (Figure 1). In this final chapter of the annotation blog series, we are going to provide descriptions of the new CNV annotations and how they can be used.…

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Reflecting on ASHG 2017

Oct 26, 2017

We’ve returned from another successful year at ASHG and had an incredible time. I find the conference to be a terrific opportunity to connect with our customers, partners, and friends in the industry. This year’s Presidential Symposium was a true delight featuring a discussion of global health and genomics between two…

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Annotation Education Series: Frequency, Functional Prediction, and Gene Annotations

Oct 26, 2017

In our final chapter of this variant annotation blog series, we will discuss additional annotations that provide powerful variant filtering and analysis capability. Golden Helix curates many annotations in a way that allows for simple analysis and saves the users the hassle of all this data management. Whether you are…

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VarSeq Updated with CNV Annotations, CNV PhoRank and Region Assessment Catalogs

Oct 19, 2017

VarSeq Updated with CNV Annotations, CNV PhoRank, and Region Assessment Catalogs This year we have released multiple advances to support CNV analysis in VarSeq, expanding our target region based VS-CNV caller to handle exomes and low-depth genomes as well as additional supporting algorithms like calling Loss of Heterozygosity regions. To…

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Goodbye snow … hello Orlando!

Oct 17, 2017

We look forward to seeing you all at ASHG 2017! Golden Helix is leaving the snowy mountains of Bozeman, MT and heading for the sunny streets of Orlando, FL to attend the 2017 American Society of Human Genetics Conference (ASHG)! We’re excited to be returning for the 12th year in…

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All of your VS-CNV annotation questions answered

Oct 12, 2017

This month we hosted two, incredible webcasts officially announcing the latest CNV annotation capabilities our Software Engineering Team has been hard at work on for the past couple of months. Our first webcast, Comprehensive Clinical Workflows for Copy Number Variants in VarSeq, was presented by Golden Helix’s VP of Product…

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Annotation Education Series: Cancer Annotations

Oct 5, 2017

CIViC The Clinical Interpretations of Variants in Cancer, better known as CIViC, is an open access open source, community-driven web resource available to all VarSeq users. Nature Genetics published an article that states, “CIViC accepts public knowledge contributions but requires that experts review these submissions”. Fundamentally, the focus behind CIViC…

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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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CNV Annotation Clinical Workflows Webcast: Q&A

Sep 28, 2017

  Gabe Rudy gave a fantastic presentation yesterday on the latest additions to VS-CNV annotations. If you weren’t able to join us for the live event, you can access the recording and webcast slides here: Comprehensive Clinical Workflows for Copy Number Variants in VarSeq. Additionally, there were many great questions asked…

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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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Upcoming Webcast: Comprehensive Clinical Workflows for Copy Number Variants in VarSeq

Sep 14, 2017

September 27, 2017 12:00 PM, EDT While Copy Number Variants are important to detect and interpret in many clinical genetic tests, labs have been without a comprehensive solution that integrates the annotating and reporting of high-quality CNV alongside their existing NGS variants. Golden Helix has developed and validated with our…

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Sentieon’s Secondary Analysis Tools Explained

Sep 12, 2017

We find ourselves talking about our partnership with Sentieon, a lot! More specifically, we are always extolling the powerful, comprehensive genomic data analysis solution we are able to offer our clients. Sentieon’s Secondary Analysis Suite made a significant improvement in runtime over BWA-MEM, GATK, Mutect, and MuTect2 while providing deterministic…

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Upcoming Webcast: Advantages of VarSeq’s Annotation Capabilities

Aug 31, 2017

September 13, 2017 12:00 PM, EST This month we’re branching out and covering a topic we’ve never explored before – annotation capabilities! Darby Kammeraad, Field Application Scientist at Golden Helix, will be giving us some insight into the advantages of VarSeq’s capability with annotations. The number of annotation topics to…

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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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Customer Publications From Around the Globe

Aug 17, 2017

It’s fascinating to hear the various ways our products are being used by customers all around the world. This month we’re featuring publications citing VarSeq, SVS and HelixTree which cover studies from Schizophrenia, Multiple Sclerosis and more. We hope you enjoy! Exome sequencing in schizophrenic patients with high levels of homozygosity identifies…

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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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GWAS Workflows with SVS webcast Q & A

Aug 10, 2017

In case you missed our live event yesterday, I wanted to share a link to the webcast recording: New Enhancements: GWAS Workflows with SVS. There were several questions asked, so we’ve also shared the Q & A session below! Question: Are these enhancements priced as a separate feature?  Answer: No, SVS is a constantly…

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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 analytics framework for next-gen sequencing data. There are a number of different approaches to CNV…

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