One year into MyHeritage's WGS upgrade, the promised CRAM file still hasn't arrived
When MyHeritage announced in October 2025 that it was upgrading its standard DNA kit to whole genome sequencing, the response was broadly positive. The company became one of the first consumer DNA testing companies to run its kits on WGS technology at scale, using Ultima Genomics instruments at the Gene by Gene lab in Houston, Texas, as its October 2025 blog post described. That announcement included a specific forward-looking promise: customers would be able to download a full CRAM file of their genome data at no extra cost, with a target of "in 2026." A year later, that file has not arrived — and the sequencing depth behind the standard kit is considerably shallower than most buyers assume.
What many buyers do not realize is that MyHeritage's standard WGS kit runs at 2x coverage. That means each position in the genome is read about twice on average — a technique called low-pass WGS that uses statistical imputation to fill in the positions the instrument did not read clearly. The company's own DNA 360 kit, a separate and higher-priced product, uses 30x coverage. MyHeritage's DNA 360 technology page explicitly describes the contrast, noting that low-pass sequencing "relies on imputation and is less reliable for rare variants" compared to the 30x approach used for DNA 360. Both products are marketed under the phrase "whole genome sequencing." They are not equivalent products.
Coverage depth matters in ways that are easy to underestimate when comparing kit descriptions. A 30x genome calls rare variants — positions in your genome that differ from a standard reference sequence — with much higher confidence than a 2x imputed genome. Low-pass WGS is a legitimate technology for applications that depend on common variant patterns across large populations, like ethnicity estimates and genealogical DNA matching. But for rare variant analysis, pharmacogenomics, or any work that requires confident calls at specific positions, a 2x imputed result is a meaningfully different product from a 30x directly-sequenced result. The DNA 360 technology page makes this distinction explicitly; the standard kit's marketing does not.
The CRAM file delay is the other unresolved issue. A MyHeritage announcement email, quoted by the genealogy blog Geneamusings in October 2025, stated that WGS customers would be able to download their entire genome in CRAM format at no cost. The CRAM format contains the raw sequence reads from the instrument — the underlying data before it is processed into a variant list. That matters for future reanalysis: variant-calling software improves rapidly, and access to the original reads lets you run new analyses without retesting. As of this writing, MyHeritage's own help center article on the WGS upgrade says: "Our team is working hard on supporting CRAM downloads." Standard-kit customers currently receive a CSV or TXT file — the called variants only, not the raw reads. The company targeted "in 2026" for the CRAM launch. Approximately 11 weeks of 2026 remain.
For buyers who need high-confidence data now, the situation points in two directions. Within MyHeritage's own lineup, the DNA 360 kit offers 30x coverage alongside physician review and genetic counseling for US customers; the price is not displayed on the company's public product pages as of this writing. Among specialist WGS providers, Nucleus Genomics, Sequencing.com, and DNA Complete all offer 30x coverage kits that include raw CRAM or FASTQ file delivery as part of the standard package. Whether to wait out the rest of 2026 for MyHeritage's CRAM delivery — or conclude that a year is already long enough — depends on how urgently you need that raw file and whether the genealogy features that drew most buyers to MyHeritage in the first place still justify the wait.