Open Thread Feb 16 - Feb 23, 2016

Elo

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

If anyone is curious about genomes: it's unlikely. Veritas only just started offering a $1k genome; no one is announcing something that'll be ready by June which is in 5 months; and if you want to extrapolate from the historical data, while we're clearly recently jumped to a new regime starting in 2015, but extrapolating from the 2015-2016 data, genomes still shouldn't be <$500 for another 10 months or so:

R> genome <- c(9408739,9047003,8927342,7147571,3063820,1352982,752080,342502,232735,154714,108065,70333,46774,
              31512,31125,29092,20963,16712,10497,7743,7666,5901,5985,6618,5671,5826,5550,5096,4008,4920,4905,
              5731,3970,4211,1363,1245,1000)
R> l <- lm(log(I(tail(genome, 3))) ~ I(1:3)); l
# ...Coefficients:
# (Intercept)       I(1:3)  
#  7.3937180   -0.1548441  
R> exp(sapply(1:10, function(t) { 7.3937180 + -0.1548441*t } ))
# [1] 1392.5249652 1192.7654529 1021.6617017  875.1030055  749.5683444  642.0417932  549.9400652
# [8]  471.0504496  403.4776517  345.5982592

(10 rather than 8 because the first 3 time-units, 1-3, have already passed, and the remaining 5 time-units until $471 is in time-units of 2-months, so 2*5=10. I couldn't be bothered to convert the data to more sensible days/months for a quick extrapolation.)

So I would expect any $500 genome to be in 2017 or 2018. Some dark horse could overnight announce a $500 whole-genome at any time... but I wouldn't bet on it, in part because that NHS data may not reflect any such service's existence.

There is a small issue that NIH is quoting a wholesale price, while Veritas is quoting a retail price (including customer acquisition, risk of not using all capacity, and profit), so you should expect the NIH price to be lower.

0ChristianKl10y

Yes. The metric that's used is NIH data. Given that they brought sequencing machines in the last years and the cost of the sequencing machine's isn't completely included in the year they are brought and the 2016 sequencing budget likely pays for machines brought in 2014 and 2015 even if great new machine get's introduced in 2016.