The Ninth Histocompatibility Workshop

The Ninth Histocompatibility Workshop, organized by Ekkehard Albert and Wolfgang Mayr and held in Munich and Vienna in May of 1984, was comprised of 220 participating laboratories, organized into 21 regions throughout the world, testing 766 sera against cells derived from 2,300 families. Investigations into the association between HLA and susceptibility to 14 different diseases were continued. Based on data from the workshop, 14 HLA-A and B locus specificities were upgraded to full HLA status and 19 HLA-A, B, DR and DQ specificities were given provisional WHO designations (e.g., HLA-Aw66, Bw73, DRw13 and DQw3). The HLA-DQ locus was formally defined, replacing several local designations (DC, MB, MT) that had been used to describe alleles encoded by genes of this locus. At the workshop conference in Vienna, several papers describing the use of restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) method to study HLA at the DNA level were presented, demonstrating the power and utility of DNA technology in HLA typing and paving the way for its use in subsequent workshops. In this workshop, the HLA-DP locus, with six specificities, was formally described, based on cellular typing using T cell clones.

Reference: Albert ED, Baur MP, Mayr WR, eds. Histocompatibility Testing 1984. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1984.