BACKGROUND The potential use of plasma and serum for molecular diagnosis has generated interest. Tumour DNA has been found in 'the plasma and serum of cancer patients, and molecular analysis has been done on this material. We investigated the equivalent condition in pregnancy-that is, whether fetal DNA is present in maternal plasma and serum. METHODS We used a rapid-boiling method to extract ...

Featured Article: Lo YMD, Tein MSC, Lau TK, Haines CJ, Leung TN, Poon PMK, 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. There has been a multidecade search for noninvasive methods of prenatal diagnosis. In 1997, my group reported the presence of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma and ...

nowadays, new advances in the use of cell free fetal dna (cffdna) in maternal plasma of pregnant women has provided the possibility of applying cffdna in prenatal diagnosis as a non-invasive method. in contrary to the risks of invasive methods that affect both mother and fetus, applying cffdna is proven to be highly effective with lower risk. one of the applications of prenatal diagnosis is fet...

BACKGROUND Cell-free fetal nucleic acid, believed to be derived from the placenta/trophoblast, is present in the plasma of pregnant women; however, its use for predictive genetic testing has been severely limited because the circulating fetal DNA is present in a small quantity and mixed with a much larger quantity of maternal DNA. Methods for detecting fetal aneuploidy from the cell-free fetal ...

Although cell-free nucleic acids were first described in the 1940s (1 ), it was not until tumor-specific DNA sequences were detected in the plasma of cancer patients (2 ) that they started to attract the interest of the wider scientific community. Because the placenta shares numerous features with malignant tissues, such as a high rate of cell turnover and the expression of certain protooncogen...

Preterm birth, the major cause of neonatal mortality in developed countries, is associated with intrauterine infections and inflammation, although the exact mechanisms underlying this event are unclear. In this study, we show that circulating fetal DNA, which is elevated in pregnancies complicated by preterm labor or preeclampsia, triggers an inflammatory reaction that results in spontaneous pr...

Background and Aims: New advances in the use of cell-free fetal DNA (cffDNA) in maternal plasma of pregnant women has provided the possibility of applying cffDNA in prenatal diagnosis as a non-invasive method. One of the applications of prenatal diagnosis is fetal gender determination. Early prenatal determination of fetal sex is required for pregnant women at risk of X-linked and some endocrin...

Researchers and clinicians are increasingly interested in using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) analysis of cell-free DNA (cfDNA) found in plasma (the cell-free fraction of anticoagulated blood) for biomarker discovery and diagnostic applications. Two areas of specific interest are non-invasive prenatal diagnostics (1-6) and monitoring efficacy of treatment in cancer patients (7-20). Many rece...

OBJECTIVE In contrast to the traditional teaching that the placenta forms an impermeable barrier, multiple studies show that both intact fetal cells and cell-free nucleic acids circulate freely in maternal blood. Complications of pregnancy, such as pre-eclampsia, or fetal cytogenetic abnormalities, such as trisomy 21, increase transfusion of both intact fetal cells and cell-free fetal nucleic a...