LAUSR

Featured Article: Bianchi DW, Zickwolf GK, Weil GJ, Sylvester S, DeMaria MA. Male fetal progenitor cells persist in maternal blood for as long as 27 years postpartum. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 1996;93:705–8.2 “The data are the data” is a phrase often used in our laboratory. Our job as scientists is to interpret the data. In 1994, however, we were very unhappy with the data. As part of a comprehensive evaluation of monoclonal antibodies used to flow sort fetal cells from the blood of pregnant women, we found recurring evidence of circulating male cluster differentiation antigen (CD) 34+ cells when the fetus was female. At the time, the PCR technique was still relatively new; our initial interpretation of the data was that there was probable contamination of the laboratory or reagents with Y-chromosomal DNA. Knowing that fetal leukocytes had been shown to persist for up to a year in the blood of women who had given birth to a male infant (1), we hypothesized that the Y-chromosomal DNA could have originated from fetal hematopoietic stem cells from a prior pregnancy. To test this hypothesis, we recruited 8 women who were not currently pregnant, but had between 1 and 10 …