Bone marrow and peripheral blood stem cell transplant: a bioinformatics approach for mismatched donor recipient pairs

Bone marrow and peripheral blood stem cell transplants when performed outside the family require high resolution matching of donor and recipient for human leukocyte antigen loci. Marrow registries like National Marrow Development Program in developed countries maintain record of donors and provide most suitable donor when a recipient needs a transplant. Being outside families and due to lack of shared haplotypes, these are not fully matched. Depending upon condition of patient and time available, several times one or two loci mismatched marrow has to be transplanted. This matching can be further enhanced by introduction of a recently introduced branch of science known as Bioinformatics. Combining the knowledge of computer softwares and transplant biology, it is possible to place any protein (in this case specific human leukocyte antigen alleles of potential donors and recipient) against any other, for exact amino-acids match/mismatch in user defined region and thus choosing the better-matched donor. In this write-up, an introduction of few programs available that can be used for the said purpose is given with a brief discussion of approach already used by other scientists.