Customizing Workflows for Family Structure

         May 12, 2016
family structure

During the webcast yesterday, I demonstrated a few ways of customizing de Novo Candidate and Compound Heterozygous Candidate workflows to consider family structure that was slightly different from the default trio workflow. The families included additional affected and unaffected siblings added to a trio as well as looking at what could be done if there were only two affected siblings… Read more »

Advances in Medical Genetics Seminar and Workshop

         May 10, 2016
Advances in Medical Genetics Seminar and workshop

Last week, I attended the Advances in Medical Genetics conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I was asked to present on “Big Data in DNA Analytics”. The event was hosted by Prof. Dr. Majid Alfadhel of the King Saud Bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences in collaboration with the Postgraduate Training Center. The event was held to discuss the pros and cons surrounding the… Read more »

Solving the Eigenvalue Decomposition Problem for Large N

         May 5, 2016
Eigenvalue Decomposition

Solving the Eigenvalue Decomposition Problem for Large Sample Sizes Since our introduction of the mixed model methods in SVS, along with GBLUP, we have been very pleased to see it used by a number of customers working with human and agri-genomic data. As these customers have grown their genomics programs, the number of samples they have for a given analysis… Read more »

Scott Diehl Researches Genetic Causes of Periodontal Diseases Using SVS

         May 3, 2016
Dr. Scott Diehl

Scott Diehl, a professor and geneticist at Rutgers School of Dental Medicine, performs family studies, association studies and gene mapping to discover the genetic causes of periodontal diseases. Originally, Diehl had a large team of bioinformaticians in the lab to help with his analyses, but the high cost of such personnel created the need for another solution. With Golden Helix’s… Read more »

N-of-One Integration comes to VSReports

         April 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 with that in mind. Our slick, easy to use, and… Read more »

Custom Family Workflows featured in May Webcast

         April 26, 2016

Wednesday, May 11th 12:00 pm EDT VarSeq contains default workflows for Trio analysis which include filter chains for identifying de Novo and Compound Heterozygous variants, but what if you have data for a full Quad or even just a few siblings? How could your VarSeq workflow be adjusted to handle this custom family structure?In this presentation we will demonstrate how… Read more »

ICGC: The Next Generation Cancer Mutation Database Now Available

         April 21, 2016

ICGC’s database is now available For quite a while, COSMIC has been synonymous with the catalog of “known somatic mutations”. It is the ClinVar of cancer mutations and invests heavily in “expert curation” (having human experts read papers and pull out references to published somatic mutations). But it turns out there is a new kid on the block, and he… Read more »

Teaching Bioinformatics Concepts & Practical Skills

         April 19, 2016
Teaching Bioinformatics

New breakthroughs are being made every day in genomics. It’s a dynamic and fascinating industry, and with exceptional growth forecasted in the DNA sequencing market, a new generation of people are entering the field: future researchers, clinicians, counselors and doctors. This new generation will need to learn not only the science, but also understand how to process the massive amounts… Read more »

Clinical Reports – New & Improved Templates!

         April 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 Javascript and HTML know how, you can customize yours as… Read more »

Guest Presentation by Dr. Folefac Aminkeng

         April 7, 2016
Dr. Folefac Aminkeng

Dr. Folefac Aminkeng, first place winner in this year’s Abstract Challenge, will present his work to the community via a live webcast on Wednesday, April 20th at noon EDT.  Dr. Aminkeng is a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. Aminkeng’s research focus is the pharmacogenomics of adverse… Read more »

20 Most Promising Biotech Technology Solution Providers

         March 31, 2016
Biotech Technology Solution Providers

Golden Helix Featured in 20 Most Promising Biotech Technology Solution Providers for 2016! This month, CIO Review released a Biotech Technology Special in which Golden Helix was named among the 20 most promising biotech technology solution providers for 2016. Read the interview with our CEO, Andreas Scherer here: Empowering Precision Medicine through Next-Gen Technology Our customers are monumental in this… Read more »

Genotyping by Sequencing (GBS) Workflows in SVS

         March 29, 2016

Did you know you can analyze your Genotyping by Sequencing (GBS) data in SVS? Well you can! You can combine tools for both GWAS quality control and analysis with tools for NGS data analysis to either identify SNPs in your dataset or to identify differences between populations or sub-species. If your species has a reference sequence or even if you… Read more »

Getting Started with VSWarehouse – The User Experience

         March 24, 2016
VSWarehouse Updates

Wednesday, April 6th 12:00 pm EDT As the number of samples and associated data volume in a testing lab increases, it becomes imperative for labs to leverage state of the art warehousing technology that not only organizes data, but also aides and enables researchers and clinicians to perform further analysis, and ongoing research. Built on the algorithms and high-performance storage… Read more »

Cancer eBook – 2nd Edition

         March 10, 2016

In 1914, the German cytologist Theodor Boveri coined the phrase “Cancer is a disease of the genome”. At this time, his ideas were as equally revolutionary as they were highly contested. Fast forward. More than a hundred years later, Next-Generation Sequencing effectively permits a highly sensitive analysis of cancer cells. It can help us to understand mutations associated with cancer… Read more »

3rd Annual Abstract Challenge Winners!

         February 25, 2016

Thank you to all who submitted an abstract in the 2016 Abstract Challenge, it was a great success! With more than 30 submissions and a wide variety of topics, selecting only 3 winners very difficult! With that being said, here are the top 3 winners for this year’s Abstract Challenge: Our 1st place winner is Dr. Folefac Aminkeng, Postdoctoral Fellow… Read more »

Cancer Workflows in VarSeq

         February 19, 2016
VCF file format

Wednesday, March 2nd 12:00 pm EST Clinical labs must have the ability to go from a collection of samples and associated variants to a professional report documenting a short list of clinically relevant variants. Cancer Gene Panels are a common clinical application for genetic tests. In this webcast we will show how VarSeq and VSReports can be used to go… Read more »

Quality Assurance Sample Statistics Added To VarSeq

         February 18, 2016
VarSeq

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 and sequencing problems are difficult to detect through the analysis… Read more »

Scaling is in our DNA: Making Genomics Accessible

         February 11, 2016
Scalable Data

Scaling is in our DNA: Making Genomics Accessible One of the things I absolutely love about the work we do at Golden Helix is keeping up with the changes in data analysis driven by the iterative and generational leaps in technology. But one thing has always been a constant since day one: we break preconceived notions of what scale of… Read more »

Genetic Data Warehousing e-Book

         February 10, 2016
Genetic Data Warehouse

Genetic Data Warehousing e-Book In our webcast last week, we announced the upcoming release of VSWarehouse, a scalable genetic data warehouse for VarSeq. Genetic data warehousing becomes more important as Next-Generation Sequencing is taking off in the clinic, creating significant data management issues for clinicians, scientists and IT professionals alike. How can we retain the massive amounts of data coming out… Read more »

New SVS Meta-Analysis Example Project

         February 9, 2016
SVS 8

New SVS Meta-Analysis Example Project The latest version of the GWAS E-book featured a chapter on Meta-Analysis. We are pleased to make the project used in this chapter available as an example project for SVS (SNP & Variation Suite). This blog post will walk you through the analysis steps used in the example project. This information is also contained in… Read more »