The cost of microbiome sequencing

I thought that Noah Fierer was going to write about the hidden cost of bioinformatics and other analysis in his blog post “The ‘hidden’ costs of microbial community analyses“, but instead he points out that most of the cost of the laboratory analysis is not necessarily in the sequencing. This will be even more true for our project, where we plan to do an order of magnitude higher levels of multiplexing within a lane of sequencing. Someone else will need to evaluate the cost of the downstream, computational analysis of the sequences.