> still costs ~1000USD to read the ~ 1Gigabyte human genome
This piece is dropping fast though; Dante Labs will currently do it (with 30X coverage) for individuals for $500 [1]. And I believe the price for labs that do a lot of sequencing is significantly lower per-genome.
Writing is still a much bigger challenge, though. Writing something the size of the human genome is currently considered a "grand challenge" and is being tackled by HGP-Write:
That’s an impressive price, do you know anyone who’s done it? I’d be interested in knowing what the experience was like.
Illumina appear to be targeting 100USD right now. I think their markup on reagents is probably at least x10...
But even that’s super expensive compared to reading data from a HD... so you have to wonder where DNA as storage is viable. Unless a vastly cheaper read method becomes available.
I don't know anyone who's done it (it's still a bit too expensive for me to give it a shot) but it appears to be a fairly standard saliva sample kit that you mail in.
Yes compared to HDD it's way too expensive to read. However tape backups are also cumbersome and time-consuming to use, but the fact that you can get extremely cheap bulk storage from them means lots of big companies still use them. So I could see it maybe being competitive there (eventually).
This piece is dropping fast though; Dante Labs will currently do it (with 30X coverage) for individuals for $500 [1]. And I believe the price for labs that do a lot of sequencing is significantly lower per-genome.
Writing is still a much bigger challenge, though. Writing something the size of the human genome is currently considered a "grand challenge" and is being tackled by HGP-Write:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_Project-Write#Human_Gen...
[1] https://us.dantelabs.com/products/whole-genome-sequencing-wg...