UK Biobank required a cryogenic facility to store, in vapour phase, a minimum of 5 000 000 1.2 ml capacity micro-tubes held in racks of 96 tubes below -180 degrees C for a 20 year period. The archive would be housed in a 900 m(2) industrial unit remote from the main laboratory area that would be generally unmanned and would require a complete cryogenic infrastructure. A commercial supplier was commissioned to provide a complete system including design, project management, supply and installation of all the cryogenic storage requirement including bulk tank, super insulated vacuum lines, Taylor Wharton LABS80K high capacity long-term vapour phase storage vessels with inventory control systems and all the local and remote software. The large-scale storage vessels were selected to give a high storage density, temperature stability and storage in vapour phase.
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Fagan et al. (2008) studied this question.