four figures these days. fits in your hand. nanopore is a revolution. https://nanoporetech.com/products/sequence/minion
there’s youtubers that have videos about doing this in a home wetlab. very achievable. some amateur soil biologists using this to try and sample microdiversity as the planet… humanifies.
I have a mol bio home lab, and decided against it because while the devices themselves are reasonably priced, the flow cells are an expensive disposable.
I use Plasmidsaurus instead: Pay them $15/sample online, drop off the tubes in a styrophoam box labeled with a dinosaur in a nearby university building; get the results next morning. They use Oxford Nanopore, but are loading your sample along with many other samples to maximize flow cell use.
Ex-Nanopore employee here. One interesting thing we heard about internally was that OceanX[0] has one of our GridION[1] devices (slightly larger, and built-in compute) that they were using to track whales in the ocean by sequencing DNA found in seawater. Really cool.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OceanX
[1] https://nanoporetech.com/products/sequence/gridion
Do you have links to these youtubers? Sounds interesting
Not OP, but The Thought Emporium is a personal favourite. Their name belies the hands-on nature of their videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0_q-fD_lyU