Usefulness of PCR-SSP Method for Detection of HLA-DRB1*0405

Kim, Young Hoon; Lee, Kyung Hee; Kwon, Oh Joong; Seok, Jeong Ho; Cho, Young Suk

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The association between HLA-DRB1 gene and severity of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has been documented in various reports. Especially, DRB1*0405 allele shows significant association with RA in Korean patients. DRB1*0405 typing has been performed by the sequence based typing method (SBT), that is a difficult and expensive method. So we tried to replace it with a simple and inexpensive method.
METHODS
We performed the HLA-DRB1*0405 typing using PCR-SSP technique with sequence specific primers of 3 pair in 298 Koreans. These results were compared with those of high resolution sequence based typing (SBT) method.
RESULTS
Of 298 samples typed with the high resolution SBT method, 60 samples were HLA-DRB1*04 positive and showed 9 subgroups of HLA-DRB1*04 and 26 samples were HLA- DRB1*0405 positive. With the PCR-SSP method, same 26 samples were HLA-DRB1*0405 positive, showing 100% correspondence between two methods to detect HLA-DRB1*0405
CONCLUSIONS
Using PCR-SSP method to type HLA-DRB1*0405 is a very useful tools for studying the association between rheumatoid arthritis and HLA-DRB1*0405 from a practical and economic view.