KIR genotyping may be useful for optimizing selection of bone marrow transplant donors to maximize the likelihood of a potent graft versus leukemia effect.
Natural killer (NK) cells are lymphocytes of the innate immune system that fight infection by producing cytokines and killing infected cells. Their functional activity is regulated by the interaction between their surface killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIR) and Class I HLA alleles expressed on the target cell. NK cells will contain more than one type of KIR on their surface and these receptors can be either inhibitory or activating in nature.
There are 14 KIR genes and two pseudogenes located in the leukocyte receptor complex (LRC) on chromosome 19q13.4. Human NK cells express various combinations of these 16 KIR genes with two common haplotypes: Group A, which has more inhibitory receptors and Group B, which has more activating receptors.
LeanGene offers SSP and SSO KIR genotyping kits to identify KIR alleles present in a PCR-amplified sample.
