Often, companies will tell you you're paying $0.10 per sample, but "you can't just go off their numbers. You have to really cost it out," says Jeanette Papp, director of the UCLA Genotyping and Sequencing Core Facility. Some companies will sell enough primer for 4,000 samples even if you don't need it. Anticipate the sample quality and whether you need to rerun the samples, a factor that companies don't account for.
The decision on how you're going to genotype SNPs will change based on how many you have. The window between 30 SNPs and 300 can be tricky because it's not entirely clear what platform you should be using, says Peter Zandi. Sequenom instruments can work in that range, but users must do the cost comparison, he adds.
"You need to make sure you have the power to be able to answer your question before you ask it," says Seth ...
