Springer Nature [academic journals on nature.com], European Journal of Human Genetics, 4(30), p. 428-438, 2022
DOI: 10.1038/s41431-021-01012-7
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AbstractExome sequencing has been increasingly implemented in prenatal genetic testing for fetuses with morphological abnormalities but normal rapid aneuploidy detection and microarray analysis. We present a retrospective study of 90 fetuses with different abnormal ultrasound findings, in which we employed the singleton exome sequencing (sES; 75 fetuses) or to a lesser extent (15 fetuses) a multigene panel analysis of 6713 genes as a primary tool for the detection of monogenic diseases. The detection rate of pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants in this study was 34.4%. The highest diagnostic rate of 56% was in fetuses with multiple anomalies, followed by cases with skeletal or renal abnormalities (diagnostic rate of 50%, respectively). We report 20 novel disease-causing variants in different known disease-associated genes and new genotype–phenotype associations for the genes KMT2D, MN1, CDK10, and EXOC3L2. Based on our data, we postulate that sES of fetal index cases with a concurrent sampling of parental probes for targeted testing of the origin of detected fetal variants could be a suitable tool to obtain reliable and rapid prenatal results, particularly in situations where a trio analysis is not possible.