Golden Helix Blog

Annotating Cancer Mutations with CIViC

Nov 15, 2016

While clinical assessments of germline mutations have been collected in ClinVar under the stewardship of the NCBI and the collaborate effort of many testing labs, the same type of resource has been missing for mutations that could informal clinical care in Cancer. Or at least, that is what I thought until…

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Genotype Imputation and Phasing now in SNP & Variation Suite

Nov 8, 2016

One of the tools at the top of the toolbox for researchers working with microarray data is genotype imputation. Genotype imputation is the process of inferring the genotype of one or more markers based on the correlation pattern (aka linkage disequilibrium or LD) of the surrounding markers for which genotypes are known. We…

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Agrigenomics 2.0 Webcast

Oct 27, 2016

This month’s webcast, Agrigenomics 2.0 – Advanced Analysis to Accelerate Discovery, will feature two well known Agrigenomic researchers and long-time Golden Helix customers, Christopher Seabury of Texas A&M and Holly Neiburgs of Washington State University. These two will join our own Gabe Rudy for a look at advanced workflows in SVS to…

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How To Annotate and Filter Variants in SVS

Oct 20, 2016

The new Annotate and Filter algorithm is now available with the release of SVS 8.6.0, see the release notes for full details on all new and updated features. To access this new functionality, you simply need to update your SVS installation to the new version. The update can be done…

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Using GWAS to Investigate Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Oct 18, 2016

Dr. Sergey Kornilov, a Duncan Scholar in Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine, combines his broad psychology background with genetics to research the genetic basis of neurodevelopmental disorders with a unique dual perspective. Neuro-developmental disorders, for example, those of the spoken and written language, affect many worldwide –…

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See you in Vancouver for ASHG 2016!

Oct 13, 2016

It’s hard to believe that summer has already faded into fall and that ASHG 2016 is right around the corner! 2016 has been quite a busy year for us so far at Golden Helix. We have been working hard to bring our community the very best tools available for variant…

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Why Call CNVs: Getting More from your NGS Data

Oct 11, 2016

Copy Number Variants have been important to clinical genetics for quite a while now. So, what has made now the right time to be looking at calling CNVs from NGS data? Well, there are a number of good reasons. The dominant one is simply that the NGS data you are…

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Upcoming Webcast on CNV Calling of Target Regions

Sep 27, 2016

Copy Number Variations (CNVs) play an important role in human health and disease, and the detection of CNVs in clinical samples has the potential to improve clinical diagnoses and inform treatment decisions. Yet until now, if you wanted to have CNVs on your targeted gene samples, you would need an…

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Big Data Webcast Q&A

Sep 22, 2016

Gabe Rudy’s webcast yesterday, Big Data at Golden Helix: Scaling to Meet the Demand of Clinical and Research Genomics, was a huge success with well over 300 registered. In today’s blog post, I wanted to recap the Q&A session with Gabe. If you missed the webcast, check it out! Question:  What is…

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NGS-Based Clinical Testing: Part V

Sep 20, 2016

Any validated bioinformatics pipeline must be continuously monitored. Quality management in clinical testing labs ensures that any divergence from predefined quality metrics during the analysis of clinical samples is investigated. For example: There is an insufficient number of sequence reads that passed the predefined base quality score threshold The number…

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Let There Be Genomes: Big Data Genomics Webcast Teaser

Sep 15, 2016

Big data is here, but fear not, you don’t need a Hadoop cluster to analyze your genomes or your cohorts of tens of thousands of samples! It turns out, for the kind of algorithms employed in variant annotation and filtering, running optimized local programs is often faster anyway. As we…

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Determining the best LD Pruning options

Sep 13, 2016

Pruning your data based on Linkage Disequilibrium (LD) values is an important quality assurance step for GWAS analysis. In particular, some tests such as Identity by Descent Estimation (IBD), Inbreeding Coefficient Estimation (f) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) will obtain better results if the markers used are not in linkage…

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Webcast on Big Data in Genomics

Sep 8, 2016

Wednesday, September 21st @ 12:00 pm EDT Every day, the trove of genomic data is growing. Clinics are sequencing targeted genes at high read depths to report out genetic tests. Research groups are adding new exomes and genomes to their disease-specific cohorts. Agricultural breeders are genotyping their herds and flocks…

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NGS-Based Clinical Testing: Part IV

Sep 6, 2016

After the Wet Lab process has been completed, the bioinformatics analysis of the sequencing data work begins. The next three blogs will focus on three aspects of this process. The building blocks of a bioinformatics pipeline, documentation and validation (today’s topic) Quality Management Clinical Reporting The Building Blocks of an NGS…

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NGS-Based Clinical Testing: Part III

Sep 1, 2016

Getting the NGS wet bench process right is not a small undertaking. Targeted NGS assays such as multigene panels or exome sequencing allow for the targeted analysis of genomic regions that are of particular interest. For every sample type, e.g. blood, formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded specimens, saliva etc, there must be a detailed…

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NGS-Based Clinical Testing: Part II

Aug 25, 2016

We have come a long way since Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) evolved as a set of technologies in the 1970s. The higher throughput and rapid reduction of costs associated with NGS have lead to the accelerated adoption of clinical testing that we are experiencing today. Currently, it is applied to analyze…

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Personalized Medicine through Tumor Sequencing

Aug 23, 2016

Join us for a guest presentation Personalized Medicine through Tumor Sequencing by Dr. Jeffrey Rosenfeld! Wednesday, September 7th 12:00 pm EDT The identification of medications that target specific gene mutations is one of the major recent advances in cancer therapy. In 2001 Gleevec was approved to treat patients with the BCR-ABL fusion…

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FAQ: Creating Repeatable Clinical Workflows

Aug 18, 2016

Question: Now that I’ve added annotation sources for my sample, filtered down to a list of interesting variants, flagged those variants and generated a clinical report, can I save or copy the annotation sources and filters for use on another sample? Short Answer: Yes! Long Answer: VarSeq was created with…

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NGS-Based Clinical Testing: Part I

Aug 16, 2016

The adoption of genetic services is key to our ability to provide personalized medicine in the future. The goal is to better diagnose diseases, predict their outcome, and choose the best possible care option for a patient. We still have a long way to go to achieve this goal. While…

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Guest Webcast by Dr. Rohan Palmer

Aug 4, 2016

Dr. Rohan Palmer presents: Investigating Shared Additive Genetic Variation for Alcohol Dependence Wednesday, August 10th @ 12pm EDT Abstract: Molecular genetic research has supported the use of a multivariate phenotype representing alcohol dependence in studies of genetic association. One recent study found that additive genetic effects on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual…

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