Currently in the UK, prenatal diagnosis of genetic conditions and Down’s syndrome requires invasive diagnostic tests such as amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling (CVS). Procedural related miscarriage rates of about 1% have been quoted for these tests which are not usually done before 11 weeks’ gestation. Annually in the UK, 32 000 women have an invasive diagnostic test as a result of oth...

UNLABELLED Cell-free fetal nucleic acids circulating in the blood of pregnant women afford the opportunity for early, noninvasive prenatal genetic testing. The predominance of admixed maternal genetic material in circulation demands innovative means for identification and analysis of cell-free fetal DNA and RNA. Techniques using polymerase chain reaction, mass spectrometry, and sequencing have ...

AIM A digital PCR approach has recently been suggested to detect greater amounts of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma than conventional real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR). Because the digital qPCR approach uses shorter PCR amplicons than the real-time qPCR assay, we investigated whether a real-time qPCR assay appropriately modified for such short amplicons would improve the detection of cel...

We describe a reliable noninvasive fetal human platelet antigen (HPA)-1a genotyping assay on a real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) platform using cell-free fetal DNA isolated from maternal blood. Nonspecific amplification of maternal cell-free DNA is overcome by pre-PCR digestion of the cell-free DNA with the Msp1 restriction enzyme. Noninvasive fetal HPA-1a genotyping offers a safe metho...

BACKGROUND The quantity of cell-free fetal DNA in the plasma of pregnant women changes during pregnancy and seems to be different in normal and pathologic pregnancies. We investigated the possible diagnostic applications of the detection and measurement of cell-free fetal DNA by comparing quantities found in women with ectopic (EP) or intrauterine (IUP) pregnancies. METHODS We collected blood...

Cell-free DNA has been used for fetal rhesus factor and sex determination, fetal aneuploidy screening, cancer diagnostics and monitoring, and other applications. However current methods of using cell free DNA require amplification, which leads to allelic dropout and bias especially when starting with small amounts of DNA. Here we describe an amplification-free method for sequencing of cell-free...

485–7. 3. Lo YMD, Tein MS, Lau TK, Haines CJ, Leung TN, Poon PM, et al. Quantitative analysis of fetal DNA in maternal plasma and serum: implications for noninvasive prenatal diagnosis. Am J Hum Genet 1998;62:768–75. 4. Zhong XY, Laivuori H, Livingston JC, Ylikorkala O, Sibai BM, Holzgreve W, et al. Elevation of both maternal and fetal extracellular circulating deoxyribonucleic acid concentrati...

The discovery of cell-free fetal DNA molecules in plasma of pregnant women has created a paradigm shift in noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT). Circulating cell-free DNA in maternal plasma has been increasingly recognized as an important proxy to detect fetal abnormalities in a noninvasive manner. A variety of approaches for NIPT using next-generation sequencing have been developed, which have ...

OBJECTIVE While large fetal copy number aberrations can generally be detected through sequencing of DNA in maternal blood, the reliability of tests depends on the fraction of DNA that originates from the fetus. Existing methods to determine this fetal fraction require additional work or are limited to male fetuses. We aimed to create a sex-independent approach without additional work. METHODS...