Multiple displacement amplification (MDA) is a method for whole-genome amplification, but a challenge is to amplify genomes evenly and accurately from single cells. Two new studies report accessible alternatives to current specialized microfluidics instrumentation. Leung et al. used a commercially available piezoelectric dispenser to process single cells in liquid droplets on a solid surface and showed robust MDA across >100 single human cells. In an alternative method, Xu et al. used a polyethylene glycol hydrogel to compartmentalize single-cell reactions and demonstrated high-fidelity MDA for cultured bacterial cells and human microbiome samples.
References
Leung, K. et al. Robust high-performance nanoliter-volume single-cell multiple displacement amplification on planar substrates. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 113, 8484–8489 (2016)
Xu, L. et al. Virtual microfluidics for digital quantification and single-cell sequencing. Nat. Methods http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3955 (2016)
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Burgess, D. Enabling accurate single-cell genome amplification. Nat Rev Genet 17, 503 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg.2016.109
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg.2016.109
