Going back to the roots: effective utilisation of HLA typing information for bone marrow registries requires full knowledge of the DNA sequences of the oligonucleotide reagents used in the testing

Information obtained by DNA-based HLA typing assays is more detailed and of higher quality than that obtained by conventional serological techniques N evertheless, it is common for data acquired in this way to be presented in the more familiar serological format. In many cases this representation can lead to significant loss of information, which may only become apparent at a later time, with the discovery of novel allele sequences, DNA-based typi ng methods, such as sequence-specific oligonucleotide probing (SSOP) or seq uence-specific priming (SSP) generate fragmentary sequence data which is in formation rich. An alternative to assigning allele names to these fragments is to simply store the sequence data itself without interpretation. Bone m arrow donor repositories can then bi searched directly with sequence inform ation, which though Lumpier is more complete, rather than searching by deri vative allele names.