[patall]

From what I get from my own research, the talk about HGP-write and a few chats with Nick Goldman (who is a very funny guy) himself, the main problem is neither storing nor accessing (which you can improve by probing and is also not that important as a primary application could be archives) but mostly synthesis which is still at minimum $1 per 10 bp.

And sequencing will become even cheaper when you do not do it from a library prep but in a controlled buffer environment. It is just currently not getting cheaper because there is no incentive for Illumina to do so (similar to Intels position in CPUs), lets hope that ONT, BGI and who ever else still hopes to get some market share (Ion Torrent, PacBio ...) can force them to evolve (project firefly, yeah).

[toufka]

Synthesis is dropping fast, and will drop even faster in the near future. There are a couple of 'humps' in the demand for synthesis. And plateaus in between. Synthesis between 0 and ~200bp gets you all you need for PCR (copy/paste). But if you can't do ~3000bp, you can't make a full-sized gene. So people get used to PCRing everything. And there is simply no proper demand for anything larger.

But with a few new players on the block (Twist, Gen9, and a few other smaller/newer startups), the goal is to hit economical ~2-3kb, at which point the race is back on again, and whole new markets will open up. And the moment that happens, expect the price to drop again. Competition will kick back in and everyone's price will drop.

The size of a moderate plasmid (~5-7,000) is another hurdle, and the size of a small chromosome is another (~100,000).

Also, if you're ordering DNA in pools or bulk (have a good compression algorithm), you can get the price/bp to come down even more.