PAGE 7 OF 9 Nucleic Acids Research, 2005, Vol. 33, No. 10 e91 Figure 4. MDA products were useful for a variety of genetic applications, including sequencing and SNP and STR analysis. (A) A mutation at 45803241 of NT_010194.16 is marked by red arrows in the S14 MDA product. (B) Sequencing traces for rs1048943 (marked by red arrows) and its flanking 10 nt in genomic DNA, S14, S06 and S16 MDA products. S06 has two alleles, although the C allele was much preferred for amplification. (C) The electropherogram for the D10S547 locus in genomic DNA, S14, S04 and S05 samples displayed by GeneMapper V3.0. Their genotypes were displayed in Table 5. S14 was observed to have two alleles (244 and 254), although allele 254 showed to be preferentially amplified. The orange peak is a 250 bp marker. (D) The interface for the identification of genotypes at rs1535721 locus by Taqman assay using the ABI7900. The green one is for genomic DNA sample, blue for S05, S13 and S15, and red for S06, S08, S14, S16 and S16MDA2. · is for S04, for which the amplification failed. sequenced and only one mutation was identiﬁed, although we do not know whether this mutation came from the sperm itself or MDA treatment. The error rate of MDA was estimated to be 3.65 · 10 5. In fact, during the ampliﬁcation of single DNA molecules, many mutations in the ﬁrst two strands replicated, which created a 1:3 ratio of mutated to normal allele, can be detected by sequencing, so the incorporation error rate for F29 DNA polymerase should be <3.65 · 10 5. Microsatellite slippage is a big problem in WGA from sin- gle cells using PCR-based methods, especially those in which thermophilic polymerases without strand displacement activ- ity, such as Taq or Pfu, were used (26,37,38). The MDA