[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.