Frozen crab from 2018 - Still usable?

[aspencoyle]

I was chatting with an old coworker in Kodiak today about the possible logistics of a project examining gene expression in Hematodinium, and they mentioned that they've still got 50-100 infected crab in the freezer! I was wondering if these samples would still be usable.

Some details on the history of these samples:

• Crabs were collected live from the northern Bering Sea on the the 2018 St. Matthew Island Blue King Crab survey
• All are female or immature male snow crab (interesting because the opportunities to collect infected snow crab are fairly limited)
• Each crab was placed in a gallon Ziploc and put directly into the ship freezer (kept at 0F). Samples have been kept in various freezers since then, all approximately 0F.
• Samples are currently in Kodiak, AK. They could be shipped to Seattle via air cargo in approximately 24 hours.

I imagine all RNA has degraded past the point of usability over the past 2.5 years, but that the DNA is still likely still stable! Is that accurate, and if so, is there anything else that I could get from these samples?