MDAGenera: An Efficient and Accurate Simulator for Multiple Displacement Amplification

The advance of single cell sequencing advocates a new era to delineate intratumor heterogeneity and traces the evolution of single cells at molecular level. However, current single cell technology is hindered by an indispensable step of genome amplification to accumulate enough samples to reach the sequencing requirement. Multiple Displacement Amplification (MDA) method is the major technology adopted for genome amplification. But it suffers from a major drawback of large amplification bias, resulting in time and label consuming. To fulfill this gap, we have presented a simulation software for the MDA process in this paper. The proposed simulator was based on an original hypothesis for catering to empirical MDA process. It was implemented to achieve high efficiency with affordable computational cost, thus allowing for an individual MDA experiment to be simulated quickly. Surprising nice experiments demonstrated the simulator is promising in providing guidance and cross-validation for experimental MDA.