  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.
