"Nature" has been publishing comments from scientists regarding their "question of the year". what would you do if the price of sequencing fell to $1000? this will, more than likely, occur in the near future.
this reminds me of an old presidential debate, where ross.perot asked which you would rather manufacture -- 'computer chips or potato chips'...
the answer, of course, is ... it depends. both computer chips and potato chips have become commodities of a sort. neither is particularly profitable (that is, each has a low per-unit profit and you need to sell lots to make lots of profit). though, at least some folks are making money by selling $10/lb potato chips!
so;
what would i do?
nothing.
in a few years, the kilo-buck sequence (sorry, dr.o'brien) will only be a buck.
in a few more years our computers will be able to process the huge amount of data we are discussing. by that time, after all our genomes have been sequenced and terrabases of sequence extracted, we will finally realize what we knew way back when.
that Genotype does not exist independently of Environment and that Phenotype is an emergent property of a system -- not a sequence.
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an interesting new article in the trade publication "in sequence" reports:
At Cambridge Healthtech Institute's conference on Next Generation Sequencing Technologies, held last week in San Diego, a roundtable discussion entitled “The $1,000 Genome: Are We There Yet?” gave industry and academic players a forum to discuss the issue.
According to Michael Egholm, vice president of molecular biology at 454 Life Sciences, it currently costs around $1 million to do that kind of project on his company’s instrument, and “people who can afford to do that are interested,” he said.
Egholm predicted that cost will drop to between $10,000 and $100,000 by 2010 “if not before,” which is “going to be very attractive” to many.
Jay Shendure, a researcher in the department of genetics at Harvard Medical School and roundtable panelist, predicted it will cost around $25,000 to sequence a human genome by 2010.
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