4 ms·
Synthesis is still quite expensive at a penny a base, much less a dime a base. To give a comparison to sequencing, costs are about a penny a megabase (~7 orders
by skosuri 11y ago
Synthesis is still quite expensive at a penny a base, much less a dime a base. To give a comparison to sequencing, costs are about a penny a megabase (~7 orders of magnitude cheaper). We have a long way to go.
Even for a small bacterial genome (1Mbp) that's $10,000 at a penny a base. To have any real power, I'd want to build at least thousands of them which is a little out of my price range.
- hyperbovine 11y agoAlso, what are the error rates? This was a major problem for NGS in the early days. (Still is, on certain platforms.)
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI guess today is my day of not groking English, but I have to ask - what do you mean by "a penny a base" and "a dime a base"? EDIT: I know what's a base pair. I didn't understand the "penny" and "dime" in this context.
- skosuri 11y agoSorry, it's short for basepair (bp) of DNA (eg a, c, t, or g). Currently it costs about ten cents a bp to synthesize a particular stretch of sequence from one of the companies in the article (dime a base). An average protein can be encoded by 1 kilo basepair, a small bacterial genome by 1 mega basepair, and a human genome by 6 giga basepair.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- angrow 11y agoThey are the American one-cent and ten-cent coins, respectively. The words are also used to indicate costs of $0.01 and $0.10.
- fisk 11y agoMaybe the confusion here is that prices are sometimes spoken of as 'a [currency unit] a [item]' which can be understood as 'one [currency unit] per [item]'.
- monocasa 11y ago1) In practice you're not synthesizing an entire bacterial genome; you're only synthesizing the small bit you're patching along with whatever the retrovirus needs. The bacteria are already pretty great at copying their base DNA on their own. : P 2) DNA synthesis has been tracking Moore's law for a number of years, and doesn't show the signs of slowing down anytime soon unlike transistors.