The best available electrophoresis-based sequencing methods average 150 base pairs per dollar for “finished” sequence. The 454 group did not publish a project cost, but the Harvard team’s finished sequence cost of 1,400 base pairs per $1 represents a ninefold reduction in price. These and other new techniques are expected very soon to bring the cost of sequencing the six billion base pairs of a personal genome down to $100,000. For any next-generation sequencing method, pushing costs still lower will depend on a few fundamental factors. Now that automation is commonplace in all systems, the biggest expenditures are for chemical reagents and equipment. Miniaturization has already reduced reagent use relative to conventional Sanger reactions one billionfold from microliters to femtoliters. Many analytic imaging devices can collect raw data at rates of one billion bytes (a gigabyte) per minute, and computers can process the information at a speed of several billion operations a second. Therefore, any imaging device lim