Over the next few weeks, I'll be working with my collaborators to prepare the final budget for our genome sequencing grant. It's amazing how much the cost has come down in the past few years. The original submitted proposal was at ~$0.10 / base pair. Since the funding is actually about 17% less than what was requested (somewhat typical and I'm not complaining), I was able to get the company who'll actually perform the sequencing to cut that about 15%. This will include training in house (Chicago) on their gene annotation software, which in itself will be interesting to write about here. It's time to start exploring how many of the genetic analysis tools have been ported to Mac OS X, besides BLAST.