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 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 »
Yesterday, it was my pleasure to share in a live webcast our integrated solution for genetic data warehousing, VSWarehouse. Although we had a great set of questions at the end of our presentation, we didn’t have time to answer all of them, so here is a selection of the remaining representative questions and my answers. We can provide a hosted version… Read more »
Compound Heterozygous Workflows: Including a 2nd Affected Child Looking for Compound Heterozygous regions for a trio is fairly straight forward in VarSeq, we include this workflow in our shipped Exome Trio Template. An example of which is included with our Example Projects which can be found by going to File > Example Projects > Example YRI Exome Trio Analysis. But… Read more »
There is no doubt that we have big data in the field of genomics in general and Next Generation Sequencing specifically. Illumina’s latest HiSeq X can produce 16 genomes per run, resulting in terabytes of raw data to crunch through. Yet all that crunching is not the hard part. So, what is the main obstacle to scientists being able to… Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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?
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 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
