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>The query to which you replied was the 2nd or 3rd casual request I've seen
>on the Mailing List for a pat answer to an unsolved and very difficult
>problem. Fetal cells in maternal blood are very rare events, and there are
>several top rate labs - Diana Bianchi's in Boston and Dorothy Lewis' in
>Houston come to mind - working really hard to develop methods which will
>probably be practical only for almost equivalently high powered labs. Yes,
>fetal cells are different in their membrane and antigenic characteristics,
>and they have been isolated (the first confirmatory PCR, identifying
>Y-chromosome-bearing fetal cells, was done in Diana's all-female lab,
>eliminating the possibility that a flake of male dandruff would produce a
>false positive result). There is a recent volume of Annals of the New York
>Academy of Sciences largely devoted to the topic. I don't think there's a
>brand new, quick and dirty method out there; anything which was discovered
>in the past year is likely to remain secret until patents are filed.
>-Howard
>
Andreas Radbruch
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