Droplet MDA for single cell whole genome sequencing. Homo sapiens

The study of cell-to-cell genomic differences in complex multicellular systems such as cancer requires the sequencing of large numbers of single cells. To enable this, uniform amplification of single-cell genomes with high reproducibility across large numbers of cells is necessary, however this remains an outstanding challenge. Here we introduce a method - Droplet MDA - that uses commercially available liquid dispensing to perform inexpensive and high-throughput single-cell whole genome amplification (WGA) in nanoliter volumes. We demonstrate robust and highly uniform nanoliter-volume single-cell WGA across a large replicate set of more than 100 single cells.