However, concern was expressed about the likelihood of continuing decreases in sequencing costs.
Cost accounting is difficult, but uniformity is desirable.
It was argued that holding spending to this level would discourage groups from exploring more efficient ways of sequencing in the long run and does not even account for the full cost of scale-up, e.g., it does not accommodate the cost of new facilities. Some argued that, in the short term, costs may actually increase rather than decrease, particularly to maintain good quality sequence. This would help them convince university officials, good personnel, and outside talent that there was a long-term future for the sequencing centers. Only one center declared plans to reach a capacity of 100 Mb per year. There was discussion of the concept of supporting sequence-ready map production for both the human and mouse genome separately from sequence production.