Unborn child's genetic make-up deduced from parental material

HERALDING a future in which a child's genetic blueprint can be safely scanned for traits and defects long before birth, researchers have announced that they have reconstructed the genome of a fetus using a blood sample from its mother and a saliva sample from its father. The work is published in Science Translational Medicine.The feat is possible because when a woman is pregnant, her blood contains fragments of DNA both from her genome and from that of her unborn child. Generally, around 13 per cent of the DNA in her blood plasma ' called 'cell-free' DNA ' comes from the fetus. The first challenge facing those, who wish to glean information about the fetus in this way is to figure out how to distinguish fetal from maternal DNA.Jay Shendure, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and his colleagues isolated 5 nanograms of cell-free DNA from a maternal blood sample taken at 18.5 weeks of gestation. They performed 'deep sequencing' on the DNA, which involved sampling fragments roughly 78 times.
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