Genetic Testing for Cancer

         January 20, 2015

In 1914 the German cytologist Theodor Boveri coined the phrase “Cancer is a disease of the genome”. At this time his ideas were equally revolutionary as they were highly contested. Fast forward. More than 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 development and… Read more »

Dr. Andreas Scherer to speak at ITI 2015

         January 15, 2015

The Integrative Therapies Institute is soon hosting the annual, ITI 2015 conference January 23rd through the 25th in sunny San Diego and our own Dr. Andreas Scherer has been invited to speak. Some of the most prominent genomic and integrative medicine specialists will gather at ITI 2015 to share case studies and protocols with the community. Attendees can expect to… Read more »

In Pursuit of Longevity: Analyzing the Supercentenarian Whole Genomes with VarSeq

         January 13, 2015

If you haven’t been closely watching the twittersphere or other headline sources of the genetics community, you may have missed the recent chatter about the whole genome sequencing of 17 supercentenarians (people who live beyond 110 years). While genetics only explains 20-30% of the longevity of those with average life-spans, it turns out there is a number of good reasons… Read more »

What to expect from Golden Helix in 2015

         January 8, 2015

There is a lot we can be grateful for at Golden Helix. The past year was marked by two major breakthrough launches. Earlier in 2014, we shipped SVS 8 which unified SVS with our GenomeBrowse product. We were able to improve SVS’ data management and visualization capabilities. In addition we added a number of new methods in SVS, such as SKAT-O, MM-KBAC, and various genomic prediction algorithms.

PAG Bound!

         January 6, 2015

Once again, we will be kicking off our year with our annual trip to San Diego for PAG XXIII. This year, it could not come at a better time. Over the last few weeks, it has been bitter cold in Montana with temps barely reaching above zero degrees and I for one am looking forward to the warm sun. And… Read more »

2014 in a Nutshell

         December 30, 2014

It’s cliche, I know, but wow…2014 flew by! And what a great year it was for the Golden Helix team – we made upgrades to both GenomeBrowse and SVS and released a brand new product – VarSeq! In April, we released GenomeBrowse 2.0, which was a reflection of our most frequent user requests. Users now have the ability to upload… Read more »

Golden Helix Gives Back – The Winners

         December 18, 2014

Last month, I announced our Golden Helix Gives Back Campaign. During times like this, when funding is tight, we wanted to make a statement to our community. We at Golden Helix are committed to empower researchers and practitioners in the life science field. For those hard working people it is nice to catch a break from time to time. After… Read more »

Genomic Prediction

         December 16, 2014

The major interest in genomic prediction is best understood by looking at the growth of the human population. Over the last few hundred years we have experienced an increase in population due to medical advances and massive increase in agricultural productivity. The planet’s population continues to explode: from 1 billion in 1820 to 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in… Read more »

Call for Abstracts!

         December 11, 2014

As Andreas Scherer mentioned in his post last Tuesday, we will kick off our 2nd annual Abstract Challenge Monday, December the 15th. Here are the details. All academic, government, and commercial organizations world-wide working with genetic data (regardless of species) are invited to apply. Your project should be using DNA-Seq, RNA-Seq, SNP, or CNV methodology, as well as testing gene panels or searching… Read more »

Bridging the gap between genetics and organic chemistry at UIUC

         December 9, 2014

As Dr. Andreas Scherer mentioned in a blog post earlier this year, Golden Helix is committed to supporting the education of the next generation of genetic researchers. And as such, over the course of 2014, we at Golden Helix are working with education programs across the US and Canada to make teaching and learning bioinformatics easier. This fall semester at the… Read more »

VarSeq: A bioinformatics Swiss Army knife

         December 5, 2014

If you’ve seen the recent webinars given by Gabe Rudy and Bryce Christensen, you’ve no doubt been impressed by the capabilities of VarSeq when it comes to annotation and filtering. However, we sometimes forget that the power that enables all this complex analysis can also be used in more mundane tasks like VCF subsetting. And although these day-to-day tasks don’t… Read more »

Announcing the 2015 Abstract Challenge

         December 2, 2014

Last year, as part of our ongoing commitment to empower genetic research, we hosted our first research competition. The competition was very successful and now we will make the competition an annual event. 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… Read more »

Analyzing Whole Exome, Large-n Cohorts in SVS

         November 25, 2014

It’s come to my attention in recent weeks, through various customer interactions, that many are not aware of the fantastic functionalities that exist in SNP and Variation Suite (SVS) for large-n DNASeq workflows; this includes large cohort analyses with case/control variables. The data you’ll see below is the publically available 1kG Phase 1 v3 Exome sequences from 1,092 individuals with… Read more »

6 Population Catalogs Compared with the ExAC 61,486 Exomes

         November 13, 2014

To say the announcement of Dan MacArthur’s group’s release of the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC) data was highly anticipated at ASHG 2014 would be an understatement. Basically, there were two types of talks at ASHG. Those that proceeded the official ExAC release talk and referred to it, and those that followed the talk and referred to it. Why is this… Read more »

Don’t miss the VarSeq user experience webcast tomorrow!

         November 4, 2014

We are shortly approaching the public launch (November 5th!) of our first clinical product, VarSeq. We could not have predicted how well the market would accept VarSeq – but we couldn’t be happier! For those of you who have not yet seen our newest product in action, I invite you to register for tomorrow’s webcast: The Golden Helix VarSeq User Experience.

Check out our newest t-shirts!

         October 30, 2014

As you might recall, we hosted our first annual t-shirt design contest this summer. We announced the winners, but kept the winning t-shirt designs themselves top secret until ASHG where we unveiled them day by day. But, if you did not attend ASHG last week, you are probably still on the edge of your seat. Well, luckily, I will reveal… Read more »

Final thoughts on ASHG14

         October 28, 2014

To make a long story short, we had a blast at ASHG14. The traffic at our booth was terrific. Every day we had scheduled presentations on VarSeq, SVS, and GenomeBrowse which were very well attended. And of course, there were our new t-shirts. The new designs were well received. If anything we promise to bring more next year. In particular more… Read more »

New Plugin for Ion Torrent Server

         October 21, 2014

Golden Helix is proud to announce the release of the Golden Helix GenomeBrowse Plugin for Ion Torrent server. The new plug-in enables adding selected BAM files from Torrent Server reports directly into GenomeBrowse. The BAM files remain on the torrent server and are streamed from the server on demand using your credentials. This feature allows GenomeBrowse users to visualize genomic… Read more »