It all started when Dante Labs offered an Amazon prime day sale product of a 30x WGS test for $199. At the time, they were shipping samples off to the BGI laboratory in Hong Kong that offered a 100 bp read length NGS service on an MGI DNB 400 sequencer. There were many hiccups during that first year but it seemed resolved when a year later Dante built their own laboratory in Italy utilizing three Illumina Novaseq 6000 NGS sequencers. The equipment and supplies were provided as part of a venture fund investment in the company. For a short time, ((Dante) were delivering superior quality results in weeks. Since then it has been a real roller coaster every 6-9 months with the company. Sometimes delivering superior results in weeks. Other times, haphazardly delaying most customers up to a year with out-of-order delivery of results; some with very poor quality.

Luckily, Dante received competition when Nebula Genomics started offering a 30x WGS service in February 2020. Previously, Nebula had only offered a 0.4x WGS service and allowed external lab microarray results to be imported. This was soon followed by Sequencing.com entering the market in Summer 2020 with YSEQ offering a product by Fall 2020.

Some hiccups would occasionally occur with all vendors as the laboratory supplies were being prioritized to the worldwide Covid19 pandemic relief needs. We even saw Dante setup a subsidiary in the UK simply to take advantage of government contract services.

We kept thinking FamilyTreeDNA / Gene by Gene would enter the WGS market with other than their existing medical service offerings. This because Dante Labs initiated an agreement in August 2023 for USA-customer orders to be collected and processed by FTDNA on their same Novaseq 6000 sequencers used for their BigY-700 product. It was ironic because you could get a 30x WGS in weeks while the FTDNA own customers of the BigY-700 y-only WES waited months. And the Dante WGS fulfilled by FTDNA was 1/2 the cost and yet 10x the capability of the BigY-700. Without notice, this agreement ended about a year later in September 2023 and many were stuck with kits they could not seemingly return. About the same time, sequencing.com started a similar agreement for their USA orders to be fulfilled by FTDNA.

The last half of 2023 through 2024 saw a big disruption with all vendors. Mainly because the MGI sequencers became widely available due to expiring patents with Illumina (the original Solexa patents). At the same time, Illumina started making its Novaseq X sequencer available — which was an attempt to compete with the MGI T7 series but only halved the difference in capability between the Novaseq 6000 mainstay and the MGI T7 intro model. During this time, new labs were setup with MGI T7 sequencers. Nebula Genomics setup a New Jersey lab with an MGI DNB T7 and no longer shipped kits to Asia. Dante Labs setup both a Novaseq X and MGI DNB T7 in their various labs. The partnership with sequencing.com seems to have spurred FTDNA to acquire and utilize an MGI DNB T7 in their lab as well. And YSEQ, which already had an in-house MGI DNB 400, started utilizing an MGI DNB T7 at a large processing center in Riga, Latvia. To date, we have not been able to identify any Illumina Novaseq X results but have MGI DNB T7 ones popping up all over.

We still occasionally see MGI DNB T10 results from the BGI Asia and Latvia labs that have those sequencers. Almost all have switched to the new v2 chemistry and flow plates. We have as yet to identify any MGI DNB T20 results which are meant to truly bring the total laboratory cost to under $100 per 30x WGS run.

During this transition period with labs, we now saw a fifth entrant into the market. Nucleus Genomics appears to be a restructuring of the previous analysis companies xxxx and xxxx with many of the same principles involved. Samples are sent back to the Eurofins Medical Laboratory in Farmingham, Massachusetts.