GxE Mixed-Model Analysis Added by Request in SVS

         October 29, 2015

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 »

Analyzing a Single Sample Exome in VarSeq

         October 22, 2015
Exome

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 »

Introduction to Sergey Kornilov

         October 8, 2015

Our final webcast presentation in the series of winners from our Annual Abstract Challenge is first place recipient Dr. Sergey Kornilov. A Postdoctoral Associate in the Child Study Center at Yale University’s School of Medicine, Dr. Kornilov’s submission focused on the genetic basis of developmental language disorders in a geographically isolated Russian-speaking population. Next week on October 14th, he will… Read more »

Top Five Add-On Scripts for SVS

         October 6, 2015

While stand-alone SVS is an amazing statistical software package for genomics analysis, adding additional Python scripts to the program can expand SVS’s genomic analysis capabilities. In this post, I’ll take you through the most frequently downloaded Add-On Scripts for SVS and the top five were not what I expected! Coming in at Number Five is the script Convert Dosages to… Read more »

See you at ASHG 2015!

         October 1, 2015

The Golden Helix® team is gearing up for ASHG 2015 in Baltimore as I would guess many of you are too. I for one am super excited since I grew up in the Baltimore area and have a fondness for Inner Harbor and crabs! This year, you will find Ashley Hintz (our Field Application Scientist) and myself just inside the… Read more »

Clinical Reporting comes to VarSeq

         September 17, 2015

The next release of VarSeq will ship a new product that is highly relevant to our customers in clinical testing labs. Via VSReports, VarSeq now has the ability to generate clinical-grade reports. These reports are fully customizable, containing focused and actionable data. VS Reports ships with report templates that are modeled off of the ACMG guidelines, the de-facto gold standard… Read more »

Precision Medicine e-Book

         September 15, 2015
e-Book

Precision Medicine e-Book “It’s far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has.” – Hippocrates (460 BC – 370 BC) Almost 2,500 years ago, Hippocrates captured one of the key principles underlying precision medicine. In the 21st century we take the understanding of the individual characteristics of a person to a new level…. Read more »

Introducing VarSeq Viewer!

         September 10, 2015

With our latest release of VarSeq last Thursday, we are proud to offer the VarSeq ® Viewer to the community, for free! When you download VarSeq ® Viewer, you can explore pre-built projects to interact with the annotations and filters the project provides, visualize selected variants with pile-ups, and export data to widely used formats. To get you started, we have included… Read more »

Dr. Scherer is a Keynote Speaker at Genomics 2015

         September 8, 2015

A widely attended conference that is coming up on September 21-23 is the third international conference on Genomics 2015 in San Antonio, Texas. The theme of this year’s conference is “Implications and Impacts of Genomic Advances on Global Health“, which promises to provide some interesting presentations and discussions. Current issues in the field to be addressed include next-gen sequencing, clinical and… Read more »

An Introduction to Hilal Al Shekaili

         September 3, 2015

The past few months our webcast has featured a winner from our Annual Abstract Challenge, and we are happy to have our second place winner, Hilal Al Shekaili, as our speaker for September. Hilal’s submission surrounded novel genetic variants in a consanguineous family with pyridoxine-dependent epilepsy, and he will speak on his studies next Wednesday, September 9th (register here). To… Read more »

OMIM Coming to VarSeq

         September 1, 2015

When it comes to down to it, the genomic variants we collect in a research and clinical setting are impossible to interpret without that important link of how genes are related to phenotypes. Indisputably, the Johns Hopkins project to catalog all evidence related to inheritable Mendelian diseases is our best repository of this evidence. Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM)… Read more »

Between Two Bases: Coordinate Representations for Describing Variants

         August 27, 2015

Have you ever scratched your head when looking up a variant and it seems like the number you have for its position is one off from what it looks like in the file or database? You may be running into the dreaded world of 1-based versus 0-based coordinate representation! If it’s any consolation, I can promise that all the bioinformaticians… Read more »

GxE Regression Option to be Available in SVS

         August 26, 2015

We are pleased to announce that another one of the most asked for features is going to be a part of our SNP & Variation Suite™ software, Gene by Environment Interaction Regression (also known as GxE Regression). Earlier this year other highly asked for features were added to SVS including applying a prediction model to a new dataset, cross-validation for… Read more »

Coverage Statistics Come to VarSeq

         August 20, 2015

A prerequisite for clinical NGS interpretation is ensuring that the data being analyzed is of high enough quality to support the test results being returned to the physician. The keystone of this quality control process is coverage analysis. Coverage analysis has two distinct parts. Ensure that there is sufficient coverage to be confident in called variants Make certain that no… Read more »

Quality Assurance: Is it a Boy or Girl?

         August 18, 2015

A common question that comes through support is if there are options in SVS for doing gender inference or checks. There is indeed functionality in SVS for this QC check!  This function is under the Genotype Menu for Sample Statistics; there are a lot of great statistics available to check the quality of your data in SVS, but I’ll walk… Read more »

The 10th Anniversary of GWAS

         July 30, 2015
10th Anniversary of GWAS

GWAS became possible about 10 years ago as the result of several scientific advances. Since then, GWAS has continually developed as a primary method for identification of disease susceptibility genes in humans and other organisms. At Golden Helix we are proud of our history in supporting GWAS analysis from its inception. Our software was used to analyze whole-genome data from… Read more »

Analyze Your 23andMe Genotype Files with Golden Helix

         July 22, 2015
23andMe

I was definitely an early adopter when it comes to personal genomics. In a recent email to their customer base announcing their one millionth customer, they revealed that I was customer #44,299. And I have been consistently impressed with the product 23andMe provides through their web interface to make your hundreds of thousands of genotyped SNPs accessible and useful. It… Read more »

Fulgent Diagnostics Implements VSPipeline to Speed Analysis & Interpretation

         July 22, 2015

Today, we are proud to announce our collaboration with Fulgent Genetics, a CLIA certified molecular diagnostics lab. Fulgent offers more than 4,000 single gene tests among others and will implement VSPipeline to help speed up their analysis and interpretation process. On our quest to enable precision medicine, we look forward to working with Fulgent and other diagnostics labs in the… Read more »

Meta-Analysis is now available in SVS!

         July 21, 2015

Earlier this spring we announced that Meta-Analysis was coming to SVS very soon. Now, I am pleased to announce that it is available in the latest release of SVS (version 8.4.0). Meta-Analysis takes the results of two or more GWAS studies for multiple SNPs or markers, and standard meta-analysis statistics are then performed on each SNP and the results compiled into… Read more »