Virtually all of us working in human genomics have put together at least one presentation slide showing the absurd drop in the cost of DNA sequencing: there's no better way of reminding ourselves (and others) of the privileged era in which we live. However, obtaining up-to-date figures on the cost of sequencing can be painful. Thoughtfully, the National Human Genome Research Institute has now saved us the trouble with a handy series of figures that they promise to update on a regular basis, and which are free to download and use.
Here's the familiar but still-horrifying drop in the cost of sequencing (expressed as US dollars per million DNA bases):
Bear in mind the vertical axis is on a logarithmic scale, so every vertical unit indicates an order of magnitude drop in cost. The reason it's so horrifying is because since January 2008 the capacity to generate sequence data has increased much, much faster than Moore's Law for computing hardware (the white line in the chart) - so our ability to create genetic data is rapidly out-stripping our ability to store and analyse it.
Now, we don't want everyone working in genomics to start using the same blue-on-grey slide to illustrate the impending datapocalypse; so I'd encourage people to download the raw data (warning: Excel file) and make their own pretty pictures.
