I have been out of the lab for a while, but as I recall the consumables were an expensive part of PCR. Taq polymerase used to be pretty costly. Perhaps scale ha

I have been out of the lab for a while, but as I recall the consumables were an expensive part of PCR. Taq polymerase used to be pretty costly. Perhaps scale has caused that to come down recently? I see a lot of comments from hackers here questioning why this would be useful. In general, you can't get anything done in molecular biology without PCR. It's a critical tool for manipulating DNA. If you're going to do even the most basic biological manipulation (inserting genes into E. coli, comparing dan samples, amplifying small quantities of DNA for further work, etc...) you need PCR.