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Comment by Dibby053 | Hacker News Reader

23andMe being a Google spin-off I wouldn't be surprised if they do a full sequencing regardless of whether you pay for it or not. At the very least I would expect them to store the samples indefinitely so they can do it once it's economically viable.

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As I understand it, full sequencing is a _lot_ more expensive. 23 and me currently shows the genotyping is like $100 while sequencing is $1000. It’s probably too expensive and time consuming for them to sequence everybody’s samples unless they pay for it.

Only a couple years ago full sequencing was closer to $10,000

Everyone knew price would drop in time, but, assuming you’re correct, it’s amazing to hear that’s happening

499 euro was the cheapest that popped up on google https://www.dantelabs.com/products/whole-genome-sequencing

Sequencing a whole genome at 30x has been around 1k for the last 10 years at least.

It's not technically a Google spin-off. Google and Sergey Brin invested in it, but it was never part of Google.

Housing the samples in a controlled environment for an extended period of time is likely way more expensive than sequencing. I suspect the samples are discarded once genotyped.

I'm no biologist but the samples seem to survive being shipped by standard mail so it doesn't look like they would need very strict storage requirements. If for any reason they do, since they take very little space it shouldn't be too expensive per-sample. What am I missing?

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