Prenatal screening and diagnosis is currently focused on the development of a noninvasive prenatal diagnostic test capable of detecting abnormalities similar to those attainable with an invasive test. One contender is cell-free fetal DNA circulating in maternal plasma and the other is intact fetal cells either from the maternal blood or the cervix. Once adequate fetal DNA is available, laboratory analytic techniques, such as sequencing and microarray, can be applied allowing detection of most cytogenetic and Mendelian fetal disorders. The question is: how close are we to achieving this feat, and what does the future hold?
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.