Until the advent of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in the 90’s of the last century, the only efficient means to find out whether an offspring has inherited a genetic disease from a couple who are carriers of the defective gene is through prenatal diagnosis (PND). However, if the fetus is found to have the genetic disease, presently the only available treatment is to abort the fetus, an...

Objectives: To characterise the subtypes of HLA-B27 in disease associated patients in the North Island of New Zealand. Methods: The subjects were 194 patients from the North Island of New Zealand. These had previously been positively tissue-typed for HLA-B27 owing to its associations with spondylarthropathies and anterior uveitis. The subjects gave informed consent to further testing of their s...

Background: Graves’ disease (GD), a highly rampant autoimmune disorder of the thyroid gland, is responsible for 60-80% of the clinical cases of hyperthyroidism. Over the past decades, genetic association studies have identified several GD susceptibility loci in CTLA-4, TSHR and major histocompatibility complex regions. The information on the association between the human leukocyte antigens (HLA...

Cerebral infarction occurs in one quarter of all children with sickle cell anemia (SCA). There is an increased risk of stroke in siblings with SCA, suggesting genetic factors may influence risk of stroke. The authors investigated whether HLA type was associated with risk of stroke in children with SCA. Fifty-three patients with SCA underwent complete HLA typing at both HLA class I (HLA-A, B) an...

HLA-A, HLA-B, HLA-C, and HLA-D typing was performed in 47 mothers of patients suffering from ocular toxoplasmosis to investigate whether an immunogenetic predisposition exists for developing congenital toxoplasmosis in their offspring. No significant association between any HLA antigen was observed in the mothers of patients with ocular toxoplasmosis, although a total absence of the HLA-B51 ant...

A new HLA-DQ-related genetic system with two alleles, 2B3 and TA10, defined serologically by MAbs and alloantisera, showed an almost perfect correlation with charge differences on DQ beta molecules, as well as with two polymorphic DNA fragments hybridizing with a DQ beta probe and various restriction enzymes on a panel of 14 DR4+ homozygous typing cells. It was therefore concluded that the sero...

BACKGROUND Successful engraftment of hematopoietic stem cells from unrelated donors is influenced by disparities between the donor and recipient for HLA-A, B, and C alleles. Disparities between HLA sequence polymorphisms that are serologically detectable are termed antigen mismatches, whereas those that can be identified only by DNA-based typing methods are termed allele mismatches. Whether bot...

The aim of this study was to investigate the occurrence of ambiguous allele combinations at the allele group level of HLA-A, -C and -B loci in the Macedonian population. The DNA samples of 214 healthy unrelated Macedonian volunteers were obtained from our DNA Bank. HLA typing was performed using the IHWG-RLS method (Reverse Line Strip, Roche Molecular Systems, USA) consisting of PCR amplificati...

HLA class II loci are useful markers in human population genetics, because they are extremely variable and because new molecular techniques allow large-scale analysis of DNA allele frequencies. Direct DNA typing by hybridization with sequence-specific oligonucleotide probes (HLA oligotyping) after enzymatic in vitro PCR amplification detects HLA allelic polymorphisms for all class II loci. A de...