LAUSR

The gene complex located on chromosome 19q13.4 encodes the Killer-cell Immunoglobulin-like Receptors (KIRs), which exhibit remarkable polymorphism in both gene content and sequences. Further, the repertoire of KIR genes varies within and between populations, creating a diverse pool of KIR genotypes. This study was carried out to characterize KIR genotypes and haplotypes among 379 Arab Kuwaiti individuals including 60 subjects from 20 trio families, 49 hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) recipients and 270 healthy Kuwaiti volunteer HCT donors. KIR Genotyping was performed by a combination of reverse sequence specific oligonucleotide probes (rSSO) and/or Real Time PCR. The frequencies of KIR genes in 270 healthy Kuwaiti volunteer donors were compared to previously reported frequencies in other populations. In addition, we compared the differences in KIR repertoire of patients and healthy donors to investigate the reproducibility of previously reported significant differences between patients with hematological malignancies and healthy donors. The observed frequencies in our cohort volunteer HCT donors was comparable to those reported in neighboring Arab populations. The activating genes KIR2DS1, KIR2DS5 and KIR3DS1 and the inhibitory gene KIR2DL5 were significantly more frequent in patients compared to healthy donors, however, none of the previously reported differences were reproducible in our Kuwaiti cohort. This report is the first description of KIR gene carrier frequency and haplotype characterization in a fairly large cohort of the Kuwaiti population, which may have implications in KIR based HCT donor selection strategies.