The amount of genetic and genomic information obtainable from the human fetus during pregnancy is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Two themes have dominated recent technological advances in prenatal diagnosis: interrogation of the fetal genome in increasingly high resolution and the development of non-invasive methods of fetal testing using cell-free DNA in maternal plasma. These two area...

UNLABELLED Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) of fetal aneuploidy using cell-free fetal DNA is becoming part of routine clinical practice. RAPIDR (Reliable Accurate Prenatal non-Invasive Diagnosis R package) is an easy-to-use open-source R package that implements several published NIPT analysis methods. The input to RAPIDR is a set of sequence alignment files in the BAM format, and the output...

Prenatal diagnosis, traditionally used as a synonymous for invasive fetal testing and evaluation of chromosomal constellation, presently encompasses many other issues like pedigree analyses, fetal risk assessment, population screening, genetic counseling and fetal diagnostic testing as well. Ultrasound guided chorionic villus samling (CVS), amniocentesis and, to a lesser extent, fetal blood sam...

the first step in the prenatal diagnosis of x-linked genetic disorders is determining fetus gender. current invasive methods to obtain the dna source of the fetus instead of its miscarriage risk, has harmful stress for high risk pregnancies. cell free fetal dna (cffdna) circulating in the maternal blood, has now become a useful source of noninvasive prenatal diagnosis. considering limitation of...

NIFTY (Non-invasive Fetal Trisomy Test) is a non-invasive prenatal test which is used for diagnosing fetal trisomy. The test is based on the analysis of cell free fetal DNA (cffDNA) present in the plasma and serum of a pregnant woman. NIFTY allows to detect fetal trisomy of chromosomes 13, 18, 21, X and Y and also X monosomy. Abnormal NIFTY results still need to be verified using other diagnost...

OBJECTIVE Development of an accurate and affordable test for the non-invasive prenatal diagnosis of Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophies (DMD/BMD) to implement in clinical practice. METHOD Cell-free DNA was extracted from maternal blood and prepared for massively parallel sequencing on an Illumina MiSeq by targeted capture enrichment of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across the dy...

Cell-free fetal DNA analysis for non-invasive prenatal screening of fetal chromosomal aneuploidy has been widely adopted for clinical use. Fetal monogenic diseases have also been shown to be amenable to non-invasive detection by maternal plasma DNA analysis. A number of recent technological developments in this area has increased the level of clinical interest, particularly as one approach does...