Biology · Genome Sequencing

Genome Sequencing Cost

$95 million to $525, then it stalled. The famous $200 and $80 genomes count consumables only.

Ended — NHGRI’s final published figure, May 2022. The endpoint is the finding, not a gap.

• 181,453× cheaper, 2001 to 2022
• 102× in the two years to October 2009
• Stalled after 2015: ~5-year halving
• Fully loaded cost, not a consumables price

A human genome cost $95,263,072 to sequence in September 2001, and $525 in May 2022: a factor of 181,453 in under twenty-one years, across three successive regimes. The readings are NHGRI’s own, quarterly, plotted at the dates NHGRI recorded them; read as annual figures they shift into the wrong years. Through 2007 Sanger sequencing halved the cost roughly every twenty months, the pace of Moore’s Law. Next-generation sequencing then left that pace far behind, cutting the cost 21-fold in the single year to October 2008 and 102-fold across the two years to October 2009, a halving time under four months. By the mid-2010s the decline had flattened. NHGRI’s last four readings run 562, 552, 525, 525, and the table ends in May 2022 because NHGRI stopped publishing it. Nothing on this basis has been published since, so the ending is the finding rather than a gap.

The stall has an accounting explanation. NHGRI prices a fully loaded production run at a funded sequencing centre: reagents are one line beside labour, instruments amortised over three years, informatics and overheads. Only the reagents kept collapsing, which is why the famous cheap genomes do not belong on this line. Illumina’s $200 NovaSeq X figure arrived four months after NHGRI’s final $525, and nothing changed in those four months; the two numbers count different things. Ultima’s $80 is the same kind of figure, a sequencing-consumables list price. Splicing a consumables price onto a fully loaded curve would manufacture a collapse that never happened.

Source: NHGRI Sequencing Cost Data Table

Download the data: genome_cost.csv · genome_cost.json

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