What's Seqonomics about?

Genome sequencing is evolving rapidly. The most obvious change is that it's becoming cheaper. The first human genome, released in 2001, cost a billion dollars. As of late 2011, the cost of sequencing a genome is $4,000 - this means that today you could sequence a quarter of a million people with the budget of the Human Genome Project.

But sequencing is changing in other ways too: Sequencing machines are becoming smaller and easier to use. As a result, new markets and new applications emerge.

In this blog, I'll explore the changes that are happening in the DNA sequencing market right now, asking questions such as:

• Does the history of the computing industry teach us anything about the future of the sequencing industry?
• What new applications will there be for radically cheaper DNA sequencing technology?
• Will genome sequences be mainly stored in the cloud?
• How will the purchase criteria for sequencing machines change in the future?

For the next few months, I'll post a new blog post every Friday. My entries will follow the dictum "Better boldly wrong rather than not having tried at all". As a result, I expect my posts to sometimes be controversial, and I hope that they'll cause some interesting discussion.