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Soon They'll Be Selling Knockoff Genomes on the Streets of Manhattan

Apr 24, 2009

Sandra Porter has a blog post at Discovering Biology in a Digital World about the cost of genome sequencing and why it's plummeted as fast as it has. "CoFactor Genomics will sequence a human genome (at 1.6X coverage) for $22,900. Knome is putting a human genome on EBay with bids starting at $68,000," she writes. According to her calculations from various service providers, Sanger sequencing now costs about $10 per kilobase, with Roche 454 coming in at about 20 cents per kb and Illumina's GA II at 4 cents (she didn't have numbers for ABI's SOLiD). The encouraging thing about this is that scientists and students alike will be able to spend less time and money on actually running a sequence and more time doing data analysis, she notes.

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