OBJECTIVETo investigate the genetic diversity in Chinese populations. And HLA-A, -B alleles and haplotypes of 190 unrelated healthy individuals of Tu nationality from Wufeng county Hubei province were identified for the associated studies of HLA gene polymorphism and disease.

METHODSThe high-resolution typing methods--sequence-based typing(SBT) was used to define the most polymorphism of exons 2 and 3 of the HLA-A, -B locus alleles. The allele and haplotype frequencies were calculated by maximum likelihood estimation with Arlequin software.

RESULTSHLA-A, -B alleles were found to be in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium(P>0.05). A total of 26 HLA-A and 41 HLA-B alleles were detected. The most frequent alleles were A*0201(0.16053), A*110101(0.14737), A*24020101(0.14211), B*4001(0.14737), B*4601(0.13947), followed by A*0207(0.08947), A*0206(0.08158), B*1301(0.07632), B*5801(0.08947), B*1501(0.09737). The frequencies of following alleles to be A*330301(0.05526), B*1502(0.05526), B*3501(0.05263) were all higher than 0.05. The extensive HLA-A-B haplotypes were observed, and the most common haplotypes were A*0202-B*4001(0.04196), A*0201-B*4601(0.03625).

CONCLUSIONIn the present study, we first analyzed the HLA-A, B gene typing with SBT, all of these results will be the basic and reference data for Tu race, and also will have the applications available to trace the population migration, clinical organ transplantation, disease-associated study, HLA genetic feature and forensic identification.