Prenatal diagnosis of fetal RhD status by molecular analysis of maternal

suggests that different targets should be equally effective for quantification of the total DNA in the plasma of pregnant women. Diagnostically, this would simplify the choice of maternal targets for circulating DNA analysis in pregnant women. This finding is particularly relevant to pregnancy-associated disorders in which quantitative ab-errations of the total plasma DNA have been found [e.g., in preeclampsia (12, 16–18)]. It is important to emphasize, however, that the CGH analysis provided data only for the predominant DNA species in maternal plasma, which are of maternal origin. Methods for analyzing the genomic representation of fetal DNA in maternal plasma will be interesting but much more difficult to achieve. It would also be interesting to analyze the genomic repre-sentation of plasma DNA in other conditions, including cancer (19, 20) and trauma (21)