Quake Team Publishes Results of Circulating RNA-Seq Experiments in Pregnant Women

from GenomeWeb

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Using sequencing to profile circulating RNA in maternal blood shows promise as a tool for monitoring pregnancy and fetal development, according to a study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Stephen Quake and colleagues at Stanford University.

“We demonstrate that it is possible to track specific longitudinal phenotypic changes in both the mother and the fetus and that it is possible to directly measure transcripts from a variety of fetal tissues in the maternal blood sample,” the authors wrote.

In addition, the researchers showed that the non-invasive gene expression profiling method might also hold potential as a diagnostic for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurologic diseases.

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