Improvement of LATE-PCR to allow single-cell analysis by pyrosequencing

Nucleic acid analysis in a single cell is very important, but the extremely small amount of template in a single cell requires a detection method more sensitive than the conventional method. In this paper, we describe a novel assay allowing a single cell genotyping by coupling improved linear-after-the-exponential-PCR (imLATE-PCR) on a modified glass slide with highly sensitive pyrosequencing. Due to the significantly increased yield of ssDNA in imLATE-PCR amplicons, it is possible to employ pyrosequencing to sequence the products from 1 μL chip PCR which directly used a single cell as the starting material. As a proof-of-concept, the 1555A>G mutation (related to inherited deafness) on mitochondrial DNA and the SNP 2731C>T of the BRCA1 gene on genomic DNA from a single cell were successfully detected, indicating that our single-cell-pyrosequencing method has high sensitivity, simple operation and is low cost. The approach has promise to be of efficient usage in the fields of diagnosis of genetic disease from a single cell, for example, preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD).