Biology · Synthetic Biology

Gene Synthesis Cost

The write side of biology: genes fell ~1,250× to 2017, then the cost simply stalled.

Ended — Carlson’s table ends in 2017; his chart runs on to 2025 without published numbers.

• $25 → $0.02/base, 1999–2017 (~1,250×)
• Price table ends 2017; new tech unnormalised
• Reading DNA far outpaced writing it
• Plotted $0.02/base is a floor, not typical

Writing DNA is the counterpart to reading it, and the two curves could hardly look more different. The cost of synthesising a gene, per base, fell from $25 in 1999 to about $0.02 by 2017, roughly 1,250-fold, tracked by Rob Carlson in the price surveys and industry interviews that became known as the Carlson curves. Then the published record stops. Carlson still updates the chart, most recently in May 2025, and it now carries the gene line past 2017, but his published table ends there. The productivity side is starker still: his writing-productivity series has no point after 2007. Set that against DNA sequencing, which kept falling by orders of magnitude, and the asymmetry is the central fact of modern biotech. We can read genomes for almost nothing and still pay real money to write them.

The reason Carlson stopped publishing numbers is not that the data went dark but that the price stopped moving. Commercial gene synthesis has sat at roughly the same level for most of a decade: Twist Bioscience, the volume leader, still lists gene fragments at seven cents a base and sequence-verified clonal genes at nine, essentially where its 2018 filing put them. Even the newer enzymatic makers have not broken it, with Ansa Biotechnologies pricing its enzymatic clonal DNA from about thirteen cents a base, more than Twist’s chemistry, competing on length and turnaround rather than cost. Carlson’s own $0.02 for 2017 is a lowest-advertised survey figure, a floor below those typical invoices, which is why the plotted line ends a little under the real going rate.

The one genuine unknown is the array-printed oligos that genes are increasingly built from: far cheaper, but Carlson says their price can only be pinned to somewhere between $0.00001 and $0.001 a base, a hundred-fold spread no single point could represent.

Source: Carlson Curves (synthesis.cc)

Download the data: dna_synthesis.csv · dna_synthesis.json

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.