How does Transcriptic stack up in terms of price? Is it prohibitively expensive for lots of stuff or is it a viable option?
PCR is something like ~$1.50/rxn with our standard genotyping protocol, which works out to ~$0.30-0.40 more than the same reaction run in house. If I recall correctly, the cost per rxn goes down if you run more in parallel, because they share the same instrument time.
Setting up that reaction might take me ~0.5 hours base, and 0.05 hours for each subsequent reaction prepared in parallel.
Grad students are cheap, but even valuing my skilled labor at minimum wage, it's cheaper to use Transcriptic.