The cell-free DNA virome of 108,349 Dutch pregnant women

Objective

Viral infections during pregnancy are a major health concern to mother and fetus. By repurposing cell-free Non Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) sequencing data, we investigated prevalence and abundance of viral DNA in a cohort of 108,349 pregnant women.

Method

Cell-free DNA (cfDNA) sequencing reads that did not map to any of the human chromosomes or mitochondrial DNA of the human reference genome build GRCh38 were aligned to 224 DNA viruses selected from the NCBI refseq viral database.

Results

In total 443,665 reads of viral origin were detected across 42,273 samples representing 165 viral species. Several are known to be potentially harmful during pregnancy and/or childbirth, including Cytomegalovirus, Parvovirus B19 and Hepatitis B. Viral sequences were mostly detected at very low abundance. However, several cases had exceptionally high viral loads for Parvovirus B19, Hepatitis B and others. We found statistically significant associations between presence of viral DNA and gestational age, maternal age, fetal fraction, cfDNA concentration and others.

Conclusion

We demonstrate the feasibility to detect viral DNA from typical genome-wide NIPT cfDNA sequencing and describe the main characteristics of the viral DNA in our cohort. Our dataset of detected viral sequence reads is made publicly available to guide future clinical implementations.