While at iGEM this past weekend, I learned that GeneArt is now charging $.55 per base for ~1 kB synthesis jobs, with delivery within 10 days.
Here is an interesting tidbit: They only charged iGEM teams $.20 per base. Anybody have any idea whether this represents their internal cost, and how much margin this might include?
Here is an updated plot for synthesis and sequencing cost. No new data, just a new rendering.
(Update: 12 November, 2008. There is a news piece in last week's Nature that claims Illumina's Genome Analyzer (GA1) was just used to sequence a whole genome in 8 weeks for $250K. However, the paper describing that sequencing efforts says:
We generated 135 Gb of sequence (4 billion paired 35-base reads) over a period of 8 weeks (December 2007 to January 2008) on six GA1 instruments averaging 3.3 Gb per production run. The approximate consumables cost (based on full list price of reagents) was $250,000.
Thus the price does not include labor, and is not a true commercial cost (labor is only truly free for professors).
I am therefore not sure if/how this price can be compared to the prices in the figure below.
Update 2: I fixed the significant figure issue with the cost axis. Alas, Open Office does not give great control over the appearance of the digits.)
