Horton R, Niblett D, Milne S, Palmer S, Tubby B, Trowsdale J, Beck S. Large-scale sequence comparisons reveal unusually high levels of variation in the HLA-DQB1 locus in the class II region of the human MHC.
J Mol Biol 1998;
282:71-97. [PMID:
9733642 DOI:
10.1006/jmbi.1998.2018]
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Abstract
Comparison of genomic sequences flanking the HLA-DQB1 locus in the human MHC class II region reveals local sequence variation of up to 10%, which is the highest level of sequence variation found in the human genome so far. The variation is haplotype-specific and extends far beyond the transcriptional unit of the DQB1 gene, suggesting hitch-hiking along with functionally selected alleles as the most likely mechanism. All major insertions/deletions (indels) were found to be of retroviral origin and in the immediate upstream region of DQB1. Possible cis-acting effects of these indels on the transcriptional regulation of DQB1 are discussed.
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