Supply costs
The lab budget and the books are my boss’s job. I just try to keep the lab stocked and the supplies ordered for the lab. That said, I shop around a bit and buy when items are on sale. Most of our lab supplies have stayed pretty constant through the years. Restriction enzymes, tissue culture supplies, chemicals, the prices on these *old* lab items haven’t changed much and they’re not that expensive.
What I am noticing is the expensive price of all the *new* supplies. The RT-PCR reagents, the deep sequencing supplies, the modified oligos, FACS analysis… those items are pricey! The control for the RT is a couple hundred. The oligos a few hundred. Is it the new technology or the times dictating the prices? I’m not sure. It does make me wonder though how some labs can afford to do these experiments. I’m assuming the price will eventually come down on these items. In the mean time, I wonder how many experiments aren’t performed because the cost of doing them is just too high for the lab.
Posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 9:06 pm Categorized as:Reagents, Suppliers You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
August 6th, 2008 at 11:32 am
I think something analogous is happening in the medical sector too… twenty, or even ten, years ago, nobody ordered an MRI for anything. Now they’re routinely used, even for bumps and sprains. That’s a whole lot of expense that previously wasn’t incurred.
On the genotyping side too – now we have practical solutions for genome-wide SNP genotyping, at fractions of a cent per SNP. But the arrays are so high density that it’s still hundreds of dollars per sample… so a genome-wide scan, which we used to do with microsatellites at low density for maybe $200-300 per sample, now probably costs $500 or more using SNP arrays. Much more data at much less per data point, but the total cost of the project is now higher. Not to mention the capital cost of the equipment to begin with.
I’m going back to doing Southern blots, with paper towels to wick up the tremendously expensive 2x SSC transfer buffer.
/old and grumpy