USB DNA micro sequencer for $1k

Amazing tech, unfortunately you (the biohacker you, not necessarily the categorical you) probably can't afford the 99.99999% of what else is needed to make it do anything awesome.

To do something/anything interesting on your own with this sequencer (let's not include really interesting stuff like serious cancer research because that adds about 5+ orders of magnitude to the total price) with it you need a full-on molecular biology lab (do you have a molecular biology workflow? Reagents? A lab? Powerful informatics? Trained staff? Molecular biologists and bioinformaticians? They'll want a good benefits plan? How's your comp and insurance? What about your FDA regulatory documents and their associated advisor? How about your lawyers? Clinical sites? IRB approvals? Travel budgets?).

Oh, you're at a university? That's cute but the tech transfer office owns your soul, study up now unless you've got a real keen eye for patent licensing terms. You got a good lawyer friend? Now's the time to mine them for free advice over beers.

Then let's talk about your investors (you'll need them unless you're Tony Stark or Elon-class) who will want to know why you're even qualified before they hand over a penny--unless they're fools, which you want avoid, life is hard enough without adversarial fools as investors. Oh, and fools or not, they're also much better than you at business and finance, so be prepared for the egregious terms coupled with a real possibility of horrific incoming frivolous lawsuits if you don't play along with their terms ("thank you professor we'll take it from here"). You better also budget for the banks and their advisors, who you also surely won't get to pick.

So no, it's not $1k for you to sequence a genome and do much interesting. We have a long ways to go. Good luck!

Source: have done this. The PTSD is a thing.

This is wildly cool, I want one. No clue what for, but 1k sequencing!

Interestingly their other products use nvidia gpus - up to 4 A series! Could be small but they use a GV100 in a smaller machine soo… maybe A100s! Did they make an ASIC for this small sequencer? FPGA? Offload to openCL/Cuda on the host computer? Very interesting

They also sell their larger machine capital cost free apparently? And only charge for consumables.

It is available at this price point for several years already. Due to the high price of consumables and other reasons, this is not practical for many applications, including sequencing your genome. One application where it shines is infectious disease monitoring in remote regions - it can run on the battery of the attached computer.

This sounds revolutionary. Is it that?

Can someone with lab experience help me contextualize this device. What did the prior sequencers cost?