Distribution of killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptors genes in the Italian Caucasian population

Abstract

Background: Killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIRs) are a family of inhibitory and activatory receptors that are expressed by most natural killer (NK) cells. The KIR gene family is polymorphic: genomic diversity is achieved through differences in gene content and allelic polymorphism. The number of KIR loci has been reported to vary among individuals, resulting in different KIR haplotypes. In this study we report the genotypic structure of KIRs in 217 unrelated healthy Italian individuals from 22 immunogenetics laboratories, located in the northern, central and southern regions of Italy.

Killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptor gene diversity in a Southern Brazilian population from the state of Paraná

“…Two genotypes (34 and 37) have not been reported in previous studies. Genotype 1, which corresponds to the putative homozygous haplotype A, was the most frequent (33.2%), similar to that observed in other populations [15,17,19,32,33,42], with the exception of Amazonian Amerindians (2.5%, p Ͻ 0.0001), Argentinean Caucasian (24.0%, p Ͻ 0.01), and Asiatic (Japanese, 56.0%, p Ͻ 0.01; and Chinese, 58.7%, p Ͻ 0.0001). The four most common genotypes in the N/NW Paran population, genotypes 1, 2, 3, and 4 (AA1, AA2.1, AB1, and AB9, respectively, according to classification of Witt et al [15]), account for 65.0% of all genotypes.…”

“…The observed frequencies were compared with that of other populations [15,17,19,20,28,32,33,37,38,42] and proved to be consistent with those of the Caucasian populations.…”

“…This correlation may be related to the process of racial admixture in Brazil. The four most common genotypes observed in this study accounted for more than 50% of all present genotypes, which were also observed in other populations [33,42]. Furthermore, two new genotypes were described.…”

“…The KIR gene frequencies for this population of Paran and other populations from the North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia are presented in Table 2 [15,17,19,20,28,32,33,37,38,42]. The comparison between this studied population and the above-mentioned population demonstrated significant differences.…”

Killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptor gene diversity in the Tibetan ethnic minority group of China

“…A hierarchical cluster was conducted based on allelic frequencies of the same 14 KIRs of our observed population and other previously published populations [26,31,32,35,36,38,39,44,[50][51][52], and a neighborjoining tree was constructed using SPSS 13.0 software. The result is shown in Figure 1.…”