Dehydrating and Reconstituting primers - (Jun/10/2014 )

Thanks for the information. 

If I may ask, are you guys involved with Oligo synthesis by any chance. 

I used to run an in-house ABI 394 synthesizer, but you have to be crazy to do that now, given how fast and cheap commercial synthesis is.

we had (maybe still have) an oligo synthesizer in-house but it became too expensive to operate and maintain so everyone here orders their oligos.

Interesting! 

Is it only the volume of work that makes commercial synthesis more feasible. Or is it that new age oligo synthesizers are cheaper to run? 

I often wonder if it would be much cheaper to run my own sequencing reactions rather than sending it to another lab. I am aware, it requires a large chunk of investment (which not a lot of labs can afford) but are running costs also that high. Since commercial labs are offering Sanger sequencing for say around $10, it must be costing them no more than $5 to actually do a test right? 

i think it's volume.

i've been running a beckman-coulter ceq-8000 sequencer (sanger). the sequencing kit costs us ~$400. it's supposed to be for 96 reactions but i squeeze ~10 more out of the kit. so each reaction costs ~$4, not counting tubes, tips, plates and primers.

then, to run the sample on the instrument, there's the tube of gel. that costs ~$90 (a little more, price went up a little). that adds ~$1/sample. the buffer adds a little to the cost. the capillary array costs ~$400 and is warranted for 100 runs (~$0.50/sample). also, you run 8 samples (per row) at a time. if you don't have a full row then you have to run blanks which costs everything except the reaction mixture.

add to that the cost of the service contract and salary of the tech and you get an idea of the cost for each sample.

we have people sending samples out for ~$5 each.

if you have a high volume then some of the costs will be reduced/sample because you can get discounts on the kits.

sending the sample out for sequencing

Our cost for sequencing in the Boston area is closer to $3/sample for a full plate at a time, and this is probably about as cheap as it gets. As with oligo synthesis, it is very very difficult to justify an in-house instrument with costs at that level.