BACKGROUND Reports of placental mRNA sequences in the plasma of pregnant women suggest that the placenta is the predominant source of cell-free fetal nucleic acids in maternal plasma during pregnancy. We developed an assay for gamma-globin mRNA concentrations to determine whether hematopoietic cells also contribute to the pool of fetal mRNA in maternal plasma. METHODS Frozen paired plasma sam...

Recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (RDEB) is a rare autosomal inherited skin disorder caused by mutations in COL7A1 encoding type VII collagen (C7), the major component of anchoring fibrils. In this study, we report two cases RDEB patients with new pathogenic deep-intronic point COL7A1. Patient 1 45-year-old man inversa from unrelated healthy parents, for whom sequencing genomic DNA and...

The present study examined the effects of maternal social status, with subordinate status being a chronic stressor, on development and activity of the stress axis in zebrafish embryos and larvae. Female zebrafish were confined in pairs for 48 h to establish dominant/subordinate hierarchies; their offspring were reared to 144 h post-fertilization (hpf) and sampled at five time points over develo...

Adequate maternal behavior in rats requires minimal corticotropin-releasing factor receptor (CRF-R) activation in the medial-posterior bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (mpBNST). Based on the architectural heterogeneity of the BNST and its distinct inter-neural connectivity, we tested whether CRF-R manipulation in another functional part, the anterior-dorsal BNST (adBNST), differentially modu...

Specification of the dorsal-ventral axis in the highly regulative sea urchin embryo critically relies on the zygotic expression of nodal, but whether maternal factors provide the initial spatial cue to orient this axis is not known. Although redox gradients have been proposed to entrain the dorsal-ventral axis by acting upstream of nodal, manipulating the activity of redox gradients only has mo...

variations in detection sensitivity and quantification of fetal DNA concentrations were noted among laboratories very familiar with real-time PCR technology (21). Further studies will be needed to clarify this issue in addition to the continued exploration of other strategies for the investigation of complex fetal genetic traits by analysis of maternal plasma. These strategies may include the e...