YSEQ’s Competitive new WGS Prices

It's now possible to do a WGS test with YSEQ, a reputable company operating within the European Union's data privacy laws, for $579. This is $161 less than the old price of $740. With this reduction, the YSEQ WGS is now competitive in price with Big Y for customers intending to do the YFull analysis.

Thanks to recent collaboration, YSEQ customers can automatically release their results to YFull for analysis at the discounted rate of $45.

This makes a very different price point to compare for Big Y customers intending to do the YFull analysis, who conversely, must pay a $99 BAM file download fee.

Prices on April 10, 2020:

YSEQ 45 GBases WGS ($579) + YFull analysis ($45) = $624

Big Y ($449) + BAM file ($99) + YFull analysis ($49) = $597

(note there are Big Y cost reductions for existing STR customers)

The biggest savings comes for the 90 and 150 Gbases WGS tests, now priced at $929 and $1559. These provide the highest estimated years per SNP (see stats below), second only to FGC's Chromium long read test.

Y Chromosome Coverage Histograms from Y-DNA Warehouse

Big Y coverage

45 Gbases coverage

 

90 Gbases coverage

 

150 Gbases coverage

Statistics from James Kane's Y-DNA Warehouse (April 10, 2020). Note 45 / 90 / 150 Gbases are the new product names for what were known as 15x, 30x, 50x in James Kane's page. There are also interesting coverage histograms.

For a comparable price YSEQ WGS customers will also get their entire genome which they can download for free. This includes autosomal DNA, mtDNA and analysis of their maternal line on the YFull tree. YSEQ also provides a 23andMe format file for upload to GEDMatch.

It should be noted that the Big Y product also includes 111 STRs which is not part of the YSEQ WGS product. The future isn't STRs, however - it's more people doing NGS tests which provide more reliable results than STRs for genetic genealogy and are becoming cheaper and cheaper.

It is worth mentioning that Dante Labs also offers a 30x WGS test for $650. This is however more expensive than the YSEQ 45 Gbases test (formerly known as WGS 15x) and often has less coverage and lower quality than the YSEQ test, which on average has 22.5x coverage. That is why knowledgeable customers have been paying a premium (though now much reduced) for the YSEQ WGS tests. Dante Labs does however offer medical reports, something YSEQ does not.

Another new WGS player is Nebula which announced a partnership with FTDNA. This looks like a similar business model as Dante Labs which initially offered lower prices by having the sequencing done in China and selling customer's data (in albeit an anonymized way) to third parties (pharmaceutical companies). It's conceivable that they could have similar delays which Dante's Black Friday sale customers experienced.

YSEQ has financed several open source genetic genealogy services which I have developed, including:

  • STR Match Finder Finds possible distant matches based on shared rare STRs and genetic distance. I've used this to advance haplogroup research in J-M241 and J-M102 by identifying distant matches to basal samples, whose SNP testing and YFull analysis have resulted in a better understanding of the substructure of basal lineages.
  • Clade Finder Determines clade based on positive and negative SNPs
  • Haplogroup Predictor Determines approximate clade based on STRs
These posts are the opinion of Hunter Provyn, a haplogroup researcher in J-M241 and J-M102.

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