Single-Cell Omics in Noninvasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT)

Single-Cell omics has emerged as an important tool to study the biological heterogeneity of the cell. The technique involves the analysis of genome, methylome, transcriptome, and proteome of a single-cell. It provides cutting-edge prenatal testing including genetic diagnosis of preimplantation human embryos following in vitro fertilization. The developing embryos shed cells in the maternal blood; the potential to isolate and analyze these cells is broadening the scope as well as the precision of current noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) for circulating DNA in maternal plasma. Single-cell omics is evolving at a significant rate and many technical developments have been recently made in this field. Investigation of circulating tumor cells from solid tumors and tumor-cell-free DNA is also applied in guiding, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of cancer. Single-cell omics is also poised to transform the studies of many neuronal phenomena, which have been stalled for a long time by the immense cellular complexity of the brain. Fortunately, current biological science does possess technologies for determination of single-cell genetic and epigenetic profiling at all the hierarchical levels of the genome organization to rule out single-cell variations in neurons.