Our tutorials are a popular resource for prospective users. We have added a tutorial to help introduce customers to the ease and utility of the ACMG Guidelines incorporated in VSClinical. The ACMG Guidelines are a collection of 33 criteria that are used to determine a variant’s level of pathogenicity. VSClinical and VarSeq make it easy for users to sort and… Read more »
Huntington’s Disease (HD) Background Huntington’s Disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disease that is caused by a mutation in the huntingtin (HTT) gene resulting in 36 or more CAG trinucleotide repeats in exon 1. Individuals affected by HD experience motor disorders including involuntary movements and poor coordination, cognitive impairments showing a decline in thinking and reasoning and psychiatric disorders… Read more »
Congenital Myasthenic Syndromes (CMS) History: Congenital Myasthenic Syndromes (CMS) are a group of rare hereditary conditions that can cause seizures, severe muscle weakness, respiratory problems, and potentially disabling weaknesses shortly after birth or early childhood (1). CMS is the result of abnormalities in acetylcholine proteins residing in the motor endplate of the neuromuscular junction (1). These abnormalities can be diagnosed… Read more »
Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy History It was December 9th, 1989, when one of Loyola Marymount’s strongest inside players, Hank Gathers, collapsed during the middle of a collegiate level basketball game against UC Santa Barbara. Measuring in at 6’7” and weighing 210 pounds, Gathers was diagnosed with exercise-induced ventricular tachycardia, or in layman’s terms, an abnormal heartbeat. Even with the concerning nature of… Read more »
Overview VSClinical enables users to evaluate variants according to the ACMG guidelines in a high-throughput fashion and obtain consistent results and accurate variant interpretations. This feature is tightly integrated into our VarSeq platform as well, and when paired together, users can evaluate NGS data and obtain clinical reports all in one suite. Coupled with the ability to find novel or… Read more »
Examples of Clinical Variant Interpretation with VSClinical In this chapter, I’d like to go through a few examples for variants that have been classified with the help of VSClinical. This will give you a better understanding of how data sources are actually being represented in the software and how those are used to make decisions on applicable criteria. It goes… Read more »
Rules for Combining Various Classification Criteria Now that we have a solid understanding of how the various criteria are meant to be applied, it’s time to look at how the evidence collectively leads to the clinical categorization of a variant. Let’s go through the rule framework for combining the various criteria. Pathogenic In order for a variant to be classified… Read more »
Clinical Variant Analysis – Classification Criteria of Benign Variants The classification of benign variants is overall simpler and more straightforward, with the majority of benign variants being eliminated through allele frequency in various population catalogs. BA1 If a variant is common in one or more population catalog, as indicated by the allele frequency associated by the appropriate sub-population, it can… Read more »
Clinical Variant Analysis – Classification Criteria of Pathogenic Variants The ACMG Guidelines are utilized for the interpretation of variants. They are primarily applied to diagnose suspected inherited (primarily Mendelian) disorders in a clinical diagnostic laboratory setting. While evaluating variants no matter what the origin, it is important to distinguish between variants that are pathogenic (i.e., causative) for a disease and a… Read more »
Clinical Variant Analysis – Applying ACMG Guidelines to Analyze Germline Diseases The clinical interpretation of genetic variants is time-consuming and requires strict attention to detail. Clinicians must thoroughly review any variants that could potentially cause disease using a complex set of guidelines. There are guidelines for the interpretation of variants relating to hereditary risk, germline diagnostics issued by the American… Read more »
I am excited to announce the release of my new eBook “Clinical Variant Analysis – Applying ACMG Guidelines to Analyze Germline Diseases“! You can download your complimentary by clicking on the button below. The clinical interpretation of variants in Next-Gen Sequencing is a quickly evolving field. While the body of knowledge is growing exponentially, experts have to derive sound, clinical decisions leveraging an… Read more »
This blog will conclude our VSClinical Best Practice Workflow series and focuses on one of our new reports: VSClinical ACMG Gene Panel Template. This template is valuable because it automatically enters your variant interpretation from the ACMG Guidelines into the report and eliminates the need for manual submission. I would like to explain how to properly implement this report into… Read more »
Streamlining the ACMG Guidelines and Providing Scoring Recommendations As we discussed in our recent webcast on VSClinical, the process of scoring the ACMG guidelines requires evaluating evidence for the connection between a variant and the disorder or condition being evaluated by the genetic test for an individual. These lines of evidence cover clinical presentation, gene function, bioinformatic annotations and in-silico… Read more »
Revisiting the Five Splice Site Algorithms used in Clinical Genetics Interpretation of variants in accordance with the ACMG guidelines requires that variants near canonical splice boundaries be evaluated for their potential to disrupt gene splicing [1]. The five most common tools for splice site detection are NNSplice, MaxEntScan, GeneSplicer, HumanSplicingFinder, and SpliceSiteFinder-like. Because these algorithms have been made easily accessible… Read more »
In the last installment of this series, I covered the basics of variant interpretation and how it fits into the genomic testing process. Now we can cover in more detail how VSClinical works, what algorithms and annotation sources power the recommendations and how the ACMG criteria are organized into useful categories. VSClinical is built to make the process of evaluating… Read more »
Yesterday we launched VSClincial with our first webcast in what will be a series about this powerful new way to perform variant interpretation following the ACMG guidelines. In this post, I wanted to cover the motivation for VSClinical and how we curated and presented the 33 criteria from the ACMG Guidelines into an intuitive workflow with various bioinformatic evidence and… Read more »
We just came back from ACMG in North Carolina where we launched our new product VSClinical. The reception has been terrific and our booth has never been as frequented. We had record level visitors and demo presentations. So, what is all that buzz about this new product? Why do people care so much and how does it help a clinical… Read more »
The clinical interpretation of variants is time-consuming and requires attention to details. Clinicians are being asked to thoroughly review any variants that could potentially cause disease. There are guidelines for the interpretation of variants relating to hereditary risk, germline diagnostics, and molecular oncology panels, such as those issued by the American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG), which are nationally and internationally… Read more »
Interpretation of variants in accordance with the ACMG guidelines requires that variants near canonical splice boundaries be evaluated for their potential to disrupt gene splicing [1]. The five most common tools for splice site detection are NNSplice, MaxEntScan, GeneSplicer, HumanSplicingFinder, and SpliceSiteFinder-like. Because these algorithms have been made easily accessible in the bioinformatics tool Alamut, they have been canonized for… Read more »
We have a lot to thank the 1000 Genomes project for in the genomics community. By the collaborate efforts of many researchers and organizations, the project produced not only the first catalog of rare human variation but in the process standardized many things we take for granted, such as the VCF and BAM file formats. The variant frequencies of the… Read more »
