Single-cell genomics is heavily dependent on increasing the copies of DNA found in the cell so there is enough to be sequenced. This has led to the development of strategies for whole genome amplification (WGA). Currently WGA strategies can be grouped into three categories:
* Controlled priming and PCR Amplification:  Adapter-Linker PCR WGA
* Random priming and PCR Amplification: DOP-PCR, MALBAC
* Random priming and isothermal amplification: MDA
The Adapter Linker PCR WGA is reported in many comparative studies to be best performing for diploid single cell mutation analysis, thanks to its very low Allelic Dropout effect, and for copy number variation profiling due to its low noise, both with aCGH and with NGS low Pass Sequencing. This method is only applicable to human cells, both fixed and unfixed.
One widely adopted WGA techniques is called degenerate oligonucleotide–primed polymerase chain reaction (DOP-PCR). This method uses the well established DNA amplification method PCR to try and amplify the entire genome using a large set of primers. Although simple, this method has been shown to have very low genome coverage. An improvement on DOP-PCR is Multiple displacement amplification (MDA), which uses random primers and a high fidelity enzyme, usually Φ29 DNA polymerase, to accomplish the amplification of larger fragments and greater genome coverage than DOP-PCR. Despite these improvement MDA still has a sequence dependent bias (certain parts of the genome are amplified more than others because of their sequence).  The method shown to largely avoid the bias seen in DOP-PCR and MDA is Multiple Annealing and Looping–Based Amplification Cycles (MALBAC). Bias in this system is reduced by only copying off the original DNA strand instead of making copies of copies. The main draw backs to using MALBA, is it has reduced accuracy compared to DOP-PCR and MDA due to the enzyme used to copy the DNA. Once amplified using any of the above techniques, the DNA can be sequenced using Sanger or next-generation sequencing (NGS).