Placental RNA in Maternal Plasma

Abstract

The recent demonstration of the presence of placenta-derived fetal RNA in maternal plasma has opened up new opportunities for noninvasive prenatal investigation. Circulating fetal RNA analysis could in principle be applied to all pregnancies without the limitations by fetal gender or polymorphisms between the mother and fetus. The use of fetus- or disease-specific circulating RNA markers would greatly increase the number of markers that can be used for prenatal monitoring. With the recent advances in microarray technology, new placenta-derived plasma RNA markers could be rapidly identified. These newly identified placental transcripts were robustly detectable in maternal plasma and were pregnancy-specific. Remarkably, the relative concentrations of the placental mRNA in maternal plasma directly reflect the gene expression patterns in the placenta, an observation which suggests that placental gene expression level plays a predominant role in determining the placental mRNA concentrations in maternal plasma. Thus, fetal mRNA measurement in maternal plasma may be a useful tool for noninvasive prenatal placental gene expressing profiling.

Detection of Amplifiable mRNA Extracellular to Insulin-Producing Cells: Potential for Predicting Beta Cell Mass and Function

“…Extracellular RNA has been detected in the plasma and serum of patients with various forms of cancer (4 -6 ), DNA and mRNA of fetal origin have been discovered in the plasma of pregnant women (7)(8)(9), and significantly increased concentrations of rhodopsin mRNA have been found in the peripheral blood of individuals with diabetes (10 ). Although RNA biomarkers indicative of pancreas beta cell mass and function may circulate in diabetic patients, no studies have yet investigated this possibility.…”

The Functions of Microparticles in Pre-Eclampsia

“…The relative concentration of placental mRNA in maternal plasma may directly reflect the placental gene expression. 46 Microparticles containing DNA are known as ''apoptotic bodies.'' Plasma samples from P-EC patients contain increased numbers of such DNA-containing microparticles compared with normal pregnancies, and they are thought to directly reflect the increased shedding of ''placental debris'' into the maternal circulation.…”

Implications of fetoplacental mosaicism on cell‐free DNA testing: a review of a common biological phenomenon

“…Several testing strategies are available, including massively parallel shotgun sequencing, chromosome‐selective sequence analysis or digital analysis of selected regions and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)‐only‐based analysis. Other methods of examining fetoplacental nucleic acids in maternal blood have been described previously; however, their implementation is not currently widespread in clinical practice.…”