On her blog, Sandra Porter does a little math to figure out how much it really costs to sequence a genome — like Craig Venter's. If the scientists are using Sanger sequencing, it costs about $4 a read, she says, drawing that information from the University of Michigan's core sequencing lab. To generate Venter's genome, the researchers used 32 million reads. So, Porter multiples and says, just from sequencing alone — ignoring salaries and sequence assembly and analysis — such a genome would cost about $128 million.
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