Analysis of HLA-A/B recombinant families with new polymorphic markers

The MHC in humans is a much studied region of the genome, the genes of which display a high rate of polymorphism and a high rate of linkage disequilibrium. Four families in which intra-class-I recombination has occurred have been analyzed with six polymorphic markers between HLA-A and -B in order to determine the full haplotypes of the whole families and to localize the points of crossover. The previously proposed order of the markers was confirmed by recombination mapping. In one family, the crossover was shown to have occurred in the 20-kb stretch of DNA bounded by the two markers (P3B and P5) between which no evidence of linkage disequilibrium was found, a region which constitutes of only about 1% of the distance between HLA-A and HLA-B. Although supportive of the suggestion of a hot spot of recombination in this region, based on the apparent lack of linkage disequilibrium between the markers P3B and P5, more such families need to be tested in order to confirm or refute this hypothesis.