Recent advances and application in whole‐genome multiple displacement amplification

Background The extremely small amount of DNA in a cell makes it difficult to study the whole genome of single cells, so whole‐genome amplification (WGA) is necessary to increase the DNA amount and enable downstream analyses. Multiple displacement amplification (MDA) is the most widely used WGA technique. Results Compared with amplification methods based on PCR and other methods, MDA renders high‐quality DNA products and better genome coverage by using phi29 DNA polymerase. Moreover, recently developed advanced MDA technologies such as microreactor MDA, emulsion MDA, and micro‐channel MDA have improved amplification uniformity. Additionally, the development of other novel methods such as TruePrime WGA allows for amplification without primers. Conclusion Here, we reviewed a selection of recently developed MDA methods, their advantages over other WGA methods, and improved MDA‐based technologies, followed by a discussion of future perspectives. With the continuous development of MDA and the successive update of detection technologies, MDA will be applied in increasingly more fields and provide a solid foundation for scientific research.