Description
- Abstract:
- Screening for maternal and prenatal health conditions allows for better patient care and improved health outcomes. In maternal health, hypertensive conditions like preeclampsia, which leads to an increased risk for a number of fatal complications, lack specific and sensitive screening tools. In fetal health, chromosomal abnormalities are a primary concern during development, but standard diagnostic test methods carry a risk of miscarriage, therefore there is a need for a noninvasive screening method for aneuploidy. In response to the need for new screening tools for preeclampsia and aneuploidy, two perinatal screening methods were developed: a dual-bead based assay to screen for preeclampsia and an automated capillary electropherogram based assay to screen for aneuploidy. The dual-bead assay relies on an antibody-carbohydrate sandwich used to capture sFlt-1, a protein biomarker for preeclampsia, for detection using qPCR. The aneuploidy screening method uses modified cfDNA and probes to bind DNA fragments for a non-quantitative, size based detection of aneuploidy. Experiments were unable to be executed for the preeclampsia study, but expected results are detailed. For the aneuploidy study, a series of experiments were performed to optimize a double DNA hybridization using model cfDNA and DNA probes. Results showed that preparing samples with a pH of 6 is optimal for hybridization. Future work should be done at a higher sample size to verify these results. A novel method to screen for aneuploidy in a non-invasive and non-quantitative way is presented.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Sc. M.)--Brown University, 2024
Citation
Piserchia, Jennifer,
"Developing Methods for Perinatal Health Screening"
(2024).
Biomedical Engineering Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:dj4bhq6v/
Relations
Collection:
-
Biomedical Engineering Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Biomedical Engineering department....