And if so, would it then just be a matter of time and effort (rather than equipment and materials cost) to do a more thorough sequencing of your own DNA than any lab would ever be willing to do for you?
https://aseq.substack.com/p/bringing-up-an-old-ebay-miseq
Your issues are that you will still need to purchase reagents from the sequencing instrument vendor. They will try and push you toward a service contract.
Each kit will cost ~$600 (cheapest kit) an old Illumina sequencer which you can still buy reagents for will cost at least $5000.
Doing a whole genome this way would be expensive… I’d guess $10K to $20K perhaps? You’d need a lot of kits… or one of the high spec sequencers (NextSeq 550 etc).
Alternatively you could look at getting a nanopore sequencer. This will be cheap but the data quality is different (and may not be comparable/require high coverage for certain applications). I’d guess you could do a (30x) whole genome for <$10K all inc here?
Principally create new flowcells coated with an oligo lawn would be difficult. Not impossible… but a non-trivial project…
yes, as it is stated in their website they have to comply with U.S. laws.
I assume this tech moves like most tech and it will only get cheaper like you say but also better. Are we still in the early adopter phase?
The last frontier for consumer/prosumer genomics is hifi sequencing for correctly getting at your hard-to-read areas that are full of long repeated runs. Dante Labs offers sequencing that targets this for about USD$1900, but it's an evolving area in terms of bang for your buck.