That's good to know. In that case, my concern would lie with the physical saliva samples that 23andMe has retained, since they could be comprehensively sequenced later.
That is true! Samples are usually good forever in the freezer. Do they keep all samples?
Running -80C freezers is not cheap! I have 3 -80C freezers in my lab, those large chest-freezers, and each uses 22 kWh per day for a total of 66 kWh per day. Apparently the average US household consumes 29 kWh per day, so we use up 2 houses per day.
Our freezers certainly don't hold the 14 million samples 23andMe supposedly has, more like in the low thousands. They'd need the power-usage of a city to keep all those samples OK!
You can extract the DNA and store that instead - and they already had to that to their analysis in the first place. Far smaller volume than the raw sample.
Storing this for an effectively indefinite amount is not uncommon. I used to work at a clinical genetics lab, and some material had to be stored (by law!) for a whopping 120 years.
Running -80C freezers is not cheap! I have 3 -80C freezers in my lab, those large chest-freezers, and each uses 22 kWh per day for a total of 66 kWh per day. Apparently the average US household consumes 29 kWh per day, so we use up 2 houses per day.
Our freezers certainly don't hold the 14 million samples 23andMe supposedly has, more like in the low thousands. They'd need the power-usage of a city to keep all those samples OK!