The Eleventh Histocompatibility Workshop

The Eleventh Histocompatibility Workshop, organized by Kimiyoshi Tsuji and held in Yokohama, Japan in November of 1991, included 524 laboratories (of whom 244 submitted data for central analysis) from 53 different countries. The workshop was organized into six general components: serology, DNA typing, complement studies, anthropology, disease association, and transplantation. This workshop saw the widespread introduction of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology with sequence specific oligonucleotide probe (SSOP) hybridization as an HLA-DNA typing method. A total of 195 laboratories worldwide used the standard workshop panel of HLA class II primers and probes in transplantation, disease association and anthropological studies. Eighty-five of the B-lymphoblastoid cell lines from the 10th IHIWS reference panel were typed to the allele level for class II loci with the workshop PCR/SSOP reagents. In addition, a number of other HLA-DNA typing or matching techniques using PCR-amplified DNA were described, including the reverse dot blot, PCR-RFLP, hybridization protection, PCR heteroduplex formation, single-strand conformational polymorphism (SSCP) and direct sequencing assays. At the conclusion of the Workshop, it was decided that, in the future, all serological specificities would be named on the basis of correlation with an identified sequence, eliminating the need for a provisional “w” in the specificity designation. The report on Nomenclature for Factors of the HLA System, 1991, published in the workshop proceedings, listed 41 A-locus, 61 B-locus, 18 C-locus, 61 DRB1-locus, 14 DQA1-locus, 19 DQB1-locus, 8 DPA1-locus and 38 DPB1-locus alleles. The 87 new HLA allele sequences identified in the 11th Workshop provided further documentation of the extraordinary diversity of the HLA complex that can be detected by the multiplicity of DNA typing methods now available.

Reference: Tsuji K, Aizawa M, Sasazuki T, eds. HLA 1991. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.