Franklin's hard panels allow you to analyze a sample that only needs to be analyzed in specific genes/areas. This capability can ensure compliance with your organization's privacy policies on incidental findings.
Upon creating a case, you can select any panel from your organization’s Knowledge Base as either a hard or a soft panel. By applying a hard panel, only the selected genes will be included in the variant list, disregarding the rest of the regions. Hard panels, unlike their soft counterparts, cannot be removed later in the analysis.
That way, users can be absolutely certain that they comply with their organization’s privacy policies regarding incidental findings.
How to create a case with a hard panel?
Make sure you have in your Knowledge Base a virtual panel that represents the list of genes that you want to cover in your analysis. Unsure about how to create Virtual Panels in Franklin? Check out this article.
Go to "My cases" → "New Case" → "Inherited Disease Single Case"
In "Hard Panels" - select panels and genes in the areas where you want to see variants. Notice: the case will be created and will include only variants from the genes in the hard panels. This can't be reverted later on in the analysis process only by rerunning the case
In "Soft Panels" - select panels you will want to use in the analysis process but can be un-selected or removed.
Upload/Select your sample files, add the case details and press next.
Voilà! The case will be created and only variants from the hard panels' genes will be annotated and presented in it.
Still have questions? Reach out to our Support Team, they'll be happy to help!