MDA in Capillary for Whole Genome Amplification

Abstract

Whole genome amplification (WGA) plays an important role in sample preparation of low-input templates for high-throughput sequencing. Multiple displacement amplification (MDA), a popular isothermal WGA method, suffers a major hurdle of highly uneven amplification. Optimizations have been made in the past by separating the reagents into numbers of tiny chambers or droplets in microfluidic devices, which significantly improves the amplification uniformity of MDA. However, skill barrier still exists for biological researchers to handle chip fabrication and droplet manipulation. Here, we present a novel MDA protocol, in-capillary MDA (icMDA), which significantly simplifies the manipulation and improves the uniformity of amplification by dispersing reagents in a long quasi-1D capillary tubing. We demonstrated that icMDA is able to accurately detect SNVs with higher efficiency and sensitivity. Moreover, this straightforward method employs neither customized instruments nor complicated operations, making it a ready-to-use approach for most laboratories.