Golden Helix in 2016 We had a terrific year 2015. It was the year in which we got serious about the clinical testing market. We successfully continued on the path of attracting more referenceable clients such as University of Iowa, Baby Genes, Prevention Genetics and many more. We rounded out our VarSeq suite by adding more clinically relevant features and… Read more »
Recent Customer Publications We hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! The Golden Helix team is looking forward to the start of a new year, but first we wanted to share our last round of customer publications from 2015. Here’s to many more in 2016! Bishwa Sapkota and Dharambir Sanghera of the Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center and colleagues published The Genome-wide Association Study of… Read more »
Like most, we at Golden Helix love this time of year! It is a time to spend with family and friends, creating memories and reflecting on the past year. From all of us here, to you and yours, we wish you a very happy holiday and a prosperous 2016!
As part of our ongoing commitment to empower genetic research, it is time to announce our third annual abstract challenge. Here at Golden Helix, we are dedicated to creating powerful software that enables researchers to complete complex analysis. This competition allows us to enable discovery by awarding software to those making an impact in the field. The competition has been very… Read more »
The most common use of the VarSeq Match Gene List algorithm of course is to determine if the variants in your data set are contained within your genes of interest. As an example of this, say you are working with a whole exome trio and only want to consider those variants that are contained within the 56 genes recommended by… Read more »
We have just released SVS version 8.4.2, and included in the release is a new script for visualizing Meta-Analysis results with a Forest Plot. You can find full details on all the new and updated features included with the update in our Release Notes. Release Notes from all our software products can be found on our Support Bulletin web page… Read more »
Probably one our most popular public annotation sources we curate and update is the database of Non-Synonymous Functional Predictions (dbNSFP). In it’s recent update, it has expanded the predictions to include FATHMM-MKL and VarSeq now incorporates this new prediction into its voting algorithm of now 6 different discrete predictions per variant. You can update to dbNSFP 3.0 using the built-in… Read more »
As VarSeq’s adoption has grown among analysts using whole exome data to diagnose rare diseases, a couple of family designs outside of the common trio of an affected child and both parents have come up frequently. While having both parents provides the maximum power to discover de novo mutations and recessively inherited variants, it is not always possible to contact… Read more »
With the release of VarSeq 1.3.1 we have included a new demo project to showcase a single tumor-normal pair analysis workflow. The project can be accessed through VarSeq and VarSeq Viewer by going to File > Open Example Projects > Example Tumor-Normal Pair Analysis. This project contains an exome pair (Normal-N990005 and Tumor-T990005) from the Gastric Cancer study Exome sequencing of… Read more »
From the Golden Helix family to you and yours, we wish you a happy Thanksgiving!
Recent Customer Publications We are halfway through November, and it’s hard to believe how fast the holidays are approaching. Today, we wanted to recognize recent customer publications all over the world, from China to Australia and back to the United States. Congratulations to all who published, and we hope to see many more through the end of the year! Mark… Read more »
With the release of VSReports, we added the ability to “select” rows of your filtered output (often variants, but potentially things like coverage regions or genes) with a new feature dubbed “Record Sets”, but more often described as “colored checkboxes” for your tables. Although necessary for the important task of marking primary, secondary or other sets of variants for a… Read more »
As VarSeq gains in popularity, we want to give Viewers and customers alike the opportunity to look at projects that are completed from start to finish. To this end, VarSeq (and VarSeq Viewer!) currently comes with two demonstration projects, Example TruSight Cardio Gene Panel and Example YRI Exome Trio Analysis. To access these projects from the VarSeq start page go to… Read more »
Give our SVS viewer a try today! Interested in seeing what the SNP & Variation Suite (SVS) software can do? Download the free SVS Viewer! With the SVS Viewer, you can explore and interact with the workflows of a pre-built projects. To get you started, we have included a SNP GWAS project for you to download. And don’t worry, it is… Read more »
Our webcast yesterday featured two clinical workflows and and the ease in moving from an unfiltered variant file to a clinical report containing the variants of interest using VarSeq and VSReports. There were several great questions and I wanted to pass on a few of particular interest. Question: Are annotation sources included in VarSeq for free?
Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 Passed! We at Golden Helix, and I are certain that many in our community, are more than pleased to hear that President Obama has signed the “Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015“. Most importantly, the budget agreement raises discretionary spending by $80 billion in fiscal years 2016 and 2017 which should create room for increased spending… Read more »
After our announcement in August that we would be making GxE Regression available in SVS, we were pleased to receive feedback that this was exactly what our customers had been wanting. Being able to account for environmental effects or gene effects as interacting with the SNPs was essential to those researchers working with GWAS. Unfortunately, this did not help our customers who were… Read more »
What you need to know At the beginning of October, VSReports came to VarSeq. Since then, we have been getting rave reviews from our customers. As Dr. Andreas Scherer mentioned earlier this month, VSReports takes the output of your tertiary variant analysis and converts it into a fully customized and actionable clinical grade report in just one click. Additionally, VSReports ships with… Read more »
While VarSeq comes with a number of starter workflows that are stored as templates, customers also have the option of creating filter chains from scratch; analyzing a single exome may require you to do exactly that. In this blog, I’ll go through analyzing a single exome and generating a list of variants for further study. After importing the variant data… Read more »
The month of October is flying by, and we have already had some great publications by some of our customers here at Golden Helix. We wanted to share them with you, and hope you find them as interesting as we did. Congrats to all who published! Bahram Namjou of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and colleagues published A GWAS Study on… Read more »