Research Progress of Cell-Free Fetal DNA in Non-Invasive Prenatal Diagnosis of Thalassemia

Thalassemia is a genetic disease that seriously affects the health of the fetus. At present, invasive prenatal diagnosis is the main method of thalassemia screening, but invasive prenatal diagnosis has the risk of fetal abortion. The discovery of cell-free fetal DNA (cffDNA) in the peripheral blood of pregnant women provides the possibility for non-invasive prenatal diagnosis (NIPD). Rapid and efficient capture of mutational information on cffDNA in maternal plasma can help prevent the birth of children with thalassemia major. Currently, strategies for cffDNA-based NIPD of thalassemia include the detection of paternal mutations in maternal plasma, detection of a proportion of wild and mutant alleles in maternal plasma, linkage disequilibrium single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) based on pedigree probands, and prediction of fetal genotypes by bioinformatics combined with population information. Therefore, this paper will focus on the above aspects, in order to provide an essential reference to the prevention and treatment of thalassemia.