It seems surprising that this entire project was done with $4,500 of crowdfunding. That seems very cheap. I wonder how much of the project funding came from elsewhere.
Depends on how you count. A quick scan of the paper and my fairly fresh knowledge of academic sequencing prices suggests you could do the sequencing for around $3k, with reagents (assuming you don't count the cost of unused reagents). Add in airfare, room, and board to collect the ants and fungus and you're there.
Not included: equipment, lab space, stipend (figure 6 months of one grad student, which is astonishingly fast, and that's already $12-15k), and tuition. If you were proposing the same thing to a funding agency like the NIH or NSF, you're looking at ~$60-100k, which still doesn't include a lot of the equipment. I would guess this project was pitched to crowdfunders as "I'm doing all these other experiments, but would also like to do sequencing".
It seems surprising that this entire project was done with $4,500 of crowdfunding. That seems very cheap. I wonder how much of the project funding came from elsewhere.
https://experiment.com/projects/how-does-a-parasite-create-z...