Eligible subjects were asked to participate in the study after receiving counseling about the invasive diagnostic test. Approximately 10 mL of whole blood was collected from each subject and placed in a Cell-Free DNA BCT™ tube (Streck, Omaha, NE, USA) before the invasive procedure. Within 6 hours of collection, the maternal blood samples were centrifuged first at 1,200×g for 15 min at 4°C. Plasma was transferred to microcentrifuge tubes, centrifuged again at 16,000×g for 10 min at 4°C to remove residual cells, transferred to fresh tubes, and stored at −80°C. For each sample, plasma cfDNA was extracted from 1 mL of plasma using the QIAamp Circulating Nucleic Acid Kit from Qiagen (Hilden, Germany). The resulting plasma cfDNA was used as input DNA to make a library for sequencing. End-repair of the plasma cfDNA was performed with T4 DNA polymerase, Klenow DNA polymerase, and T4 polynucleotide kinase. The adapter-ligated DNA libraries were analyzed with the Ion Proton™ System (Life Technologies, Grand Island, NY, USA) with an average 0.3×sequencing coverage per nucleotide. Ion PI™ Chip Kit version 2.0 (Life Technologies) was used for cfDNA sequencing and 10 cfDNA samples per chip were analyzed. Average total raw reads per sample was 6.5 million and mean rate of uniquely mapped reads was 59.0%.
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