Frequencies of HLA‐A, HLA‐B, HLA‐DR, and HLA‐DQ phenotypes in the United Arab Emirates population

Abstract

The high degree of polymorphism of the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system provides means for the study of diversity in different populations. The aim of this work is to study the HLA phenotype frequencies in the United Arab Emiratis in comparison with other geographically related Arabs, Iranians, and Asians, all living in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Healthy blood donors and potential kidney or bone marrow donors were typed for HLA class I (n = 1880) and class II (n = 2022). Only one representative member of each family was included to avoid bias. UAE Emiratis, Arabs of Arabian Gulf Peninsula (AGP), Arabs of South Mediterranean (SMR), North African Arabs (NA), Iranians, and Asians. HLA typing was done by microlymphocytotoxicity method and/or low-resolution polymerase chain reaction-sequence-specific primer techniques. As an individual antigen, HLA-A2 had the highest frequency in all populations studied, however, the frequency of the broad antigen A19 surpassed A2 in all the groups except the AGP Arabs and Iranians. B5 was the predominant B antigen in all groups except the SMR and Asians. Amongst the class II broad antigens, DR2 was the most frequent antigen in UAE, AGP Arabs, Iranians, and Asians. The overall frequency of DQ1 was high in all groups except the SMR Arabs who had an almost equal distribution of DQ1 and DQ3. In conclusion, this study indicates that the most frequent antigens in the UAE population are HLA-A19, HLA-A2, HLA-B5, and HLA-DR2. It also sheds light on the similarities between the UAE Emiratis, AGP Arabs, Iranians, and Asians, specially the predominance of DR2 of the class II antigens.

Differential HLA allele frequency in Mycobacterium africanum vs Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Mali

“…These high proportions suggest an important contribution of these alleles in infection acquisition and TB pathogenesis rather than a high frequency of the alleles in our study population. The proportions of the A and B subtypes reported in other populations (such as United Arab Emirates, Arabian Gulf Peninsula, South Mediterranean and North African) are higher than what we have seen in our healthy control participants, but significantly lower or similar than the proportions in our TB infected groups . It has to be noted that susceptibility to TB infection and disease progression may involve other host and microbial factors.…”

“…The antigens are well known to vary among different ethnic and racial groups even in healthy populations . Our study showed a high frequency of different MHC class I alleles in participants with TB disease compared with healthy participants.…”

HLA–B51/B5 and the risk of Behçet's disease: A systematic review and meta‐analysis of case–control genetic association studies

“…In particular, it has long been known that BD is associated with the major histocompatibility complex HLA–B5 allele (3) and, more specifically, with HLA–B51 (4), the predominant split of the HLA–B5 broad antigen (5–7). While the overrepresentation of HLA–B5 or HLA–B51 ( HLA–B51/B5 ) among individuals with BD has been abundantly replicated, substantial between-study differences were found in the strengths of this genetic association with reported risk increases that ranged between 1.3 and 16 (2,8).…”

Identification of HLA-A*0201-restricted CTL epitopes from the receptor-binding domain of MERS-CoV spike protein using a combinatorial in silico approach

“…First, the CTL nanomer epitopes from the MERS-CoV receptor-binding domain of its S protein were obtained using the best 3 of all epitope prediction servers available on the World Wide Web. Once the specific epitopes were identified, the next step was to examine whether the predicted epitopes could bind efficiently to the most frequent MHC class I allele in Middle Eastern populations, which is HLA-A*0201 (Sheth et al, 1985;Valluei et al, 2005;Ferrante and Gorski, 2007). Finally, epitope-loaded MHC class I molecule interactions with human T-cell receptor (TCR) α and β were modeled.…”