The free Golden Helix GenomeBrowse® tool delivers stunning visualizations of your genomic data that give you the power to see what is occurring at each base pair in your samples.

Features

Built for Your Computer

GenomeBrowse runs as a native desktop application on your computer. No longer do you have to sacrifice speed and interface quality to obtain a consistent cross-platform experience. It was developed with performance in mind to deliver a faster and more fluid browsing experience than any other genome browser available. GenomeBrowse is also integrated into the powerful Golden Helix VarSeq variant annotation and interpretation platform. If you love the visualization experience of GenomeBrowse, check out VarSeq for filtering, annotating, and analyzing your data before utilizing the same visualization interface.

Display all your samples

GB can display all your alignment data. Looking at all your samples in one view can help you spot contextually relevant findings.

  • Do all the cases have an InDel in the same region?
  • Is the child's mutation actually de Novo or did the variant caller miscall one of the parents?
  • Is the coverage deep enough across all samples?
Now you can have visual confirmation of the above issues and more.
Create High Quality, Print-Ready Visuals

Easily generate publication quality plots that showcase how your data clearly supports your discoveries. Plots are rendered to ensure that your data looks as good in print as it did on screen. All user interface elements that might distract from your data are stripped from the image. Colors are highly customizable, and a cross-plot anchor can be set to draw attention to the most relevant discoveries.

Gain confidence in your variant calls

GenomeBrowse displays the raw data the variant caller used to make its decision. You can quickly spot systematic strand bias, alignment mismatches due to InDels, or issues with nearby read coverage that can produce false-positive variants.

Automate your Workflow

GenomeBrowse can be controlled programmatically via HTTP so that you can quickly generate the visualizations that interest you via remote access. Use the built-in automation functionality to integrate GenomeBrowse into your existing workflow with ease and flexibility.

Unparalleled Visualizations

GenomeBrowse focuses on displaying data in a form that helps you quickly and easily understand what the data is saying. Each variant and its surrounding context are displayed in extraordinary detail.

Support for a Variety of File Formats

BAM, VCF, FTF, FASTA, TSV & CSV, BED 2Bit, WIG, and custom data sources

Awards

Software Informer Award 2021 GenomeBrowse

Use Cases

Learning

Breakthroughs are being made every day in genomics. It’s a dynamic and fascinating industry, and with exceptional growth forecasted in the DNA sequencing market, a new generation of people are entering the field: future researchers, clinicians, counselors, and doctors.

This new generation will need to learn not only the science, but also understand how to process the massive amounts of data generated with DNA sequencing (and genomics in general). Genome Browse is designed to give academics and students a simple and easy to use tool to view genomic data. It allows them to study variants within the context of the gene. It also enables more advanced views overlaying annotation sources.This tool is free for academics and students. Testing labs and other commercial entities are kindly asked to contact us.

Case Studies

We know our software will exceed your expectations. But don't just take it from us, see what our customers have benefitted from it.

Recommended Learning Materials

We have a variety of supplemental learning materials that are an excellent resource for anyone interested in the industry or our software solutions. Here are some of our recommended materials for you to check out related to GenomeBrowse!

eBooks

Read our eBook on how NGS has made its way into the clinic.

NGS-Based Clinical Testing

Tutorials

Check out our video tutorials on GenomeBrowse.

Getting Started with GenomeBrowse!

More tutorials and documentation in our Resources section.

GenomeBrowse Resources

Other Resources

For variant annotation and interpretation, check out VarSeq!

VarSeq Viewer:
Download Here


Introduction to VarSeq:
Download Here

Download

Note: GenomeBrowse is free for academic use only. If you are a commercial lab, please contact us for licensing terms.

Technical Specifications

GENERAL PURPOSE HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS

4 GB of RAM

Multicore CPU

100GB of space available for annotations and projects

ADVANCED AND WHOLE GENOME WORKFLOW HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS

If you are working with whole exomes or genomes, especially if or hundreds to thousands of samples, we suggest a high-memory configuration and plenty of storage capacity:

16GB+ of RAM (32GB for Servers)

8+ CPU Cores

1TB of space available for annotations and projects

OPERATING SYSTEMS

The following operating systems are supported:

64-bit Windows 7 or later (32-bit also supported, but not recommended)

Linux Ubuntu 14.04 or later (64-bit only)

Linux RHEL 6 or later, or equivalently CentOS 6 or later (64-bit only)

Mac OS X 10.9 or later

SERVER CONFIGURATIONS

With a server license, you can install your Golden Helix software solution on a server with multi-user access and shared resources. You can launch any number of instances of the software on the same host, and are only limited by the natural CPU, Memory and Disk resources of the server.

For Windows, you would need to use ability for multi-user Remote Desktop only available on Windows Server. We support Windows Server 2008 or newer.

On Linux, clients can log in from any operating system using SSH and open the Golden Helix software using X11-tunneling to interact with the software. On windows, we suggest a solution like MobaXterm that provides a all-in-one SSH client and X11 server to enable easy logging in, file transfer and opening of remote GUI applications.

PROXY SETTINGS, FIREWALLS, AND ANTIVIRUS

Golden Helix VarSeq and SVS can be configured to access the internet through a SOCKS5 or HTTP/HTTPS Tunneling Proxy. Go to Tools -> Proxy Settings… to configure.

The software only needs to make outgoing connections on standard HTTP/HTTPS ports and protocols. If a local firewall is installed that prevents these types of outgoing connections (this is very uncommon), firewall rules will need to be created to whitelist the software.

Note we have run into numerous issues where aggressive anti-virus programs prevent the product from performing normal operations such as opening files and logging in. You may need to whitelist Golden Helix executables or disable these tools to perform your analytics.