Scientists from South Korea discovered that various ratios of two enzymes (DYS14/GAPDH), which can be extracted from a pregnant mother's blood, indicate if the baby will be a boy or a girl. Such a test would be the first of its kind.

Hyun Mee Ryu, MD, PhD, from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Cheil General Hospital (Seoul Korea) and Women's Healthcare Center at the KwanDong University School of Medicine (Seoul, Korea) and colleagues collected maternal plasma from 203 women during their first trimester of pregnancy. The presence of circulating fetal DNA was confirmed by a quantitative methylation-specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) of U-PDE9A. Multiplex real-time PCR was used to quantify simultaneously the amount of DYS14 and GAPDH in maternal plasma. The results were confirmed by phenotype at birth.

"Generally, early fetal gender determination has been performed by invasive procedures such as chorionic villus sampling or amniocentesis. However, these invasive procedures still carry a one to two percent risk of miscarriage and cannot be performed until 11 weeks of gestation. Moreover, reliable determination of fetal gender using ultrasonography cannot be performed in the first trimester, because the development of external genitalia is not complete," said Dr. Mee Ryu.

The study was published in the January 2012 edition of the FASEB Journal. The findings could lead to a noninvasive test that would let expecting mothers know the sex of their baby as early as the first trimester.

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