Human Leukocyte Antigen Diversity: A Southern African Perspective

Table 2

Number of classical HLA alleles reported in each geographical region. Sub-Saharan Africa (including southern Africa) generally has a high number of class I alleles (ranked in the top 5 regions) with a low number of class II alleles (ranked in the bottom 5 regions). More than half of the reported class I alleles in sub-Saharan Africa come from southern Africa, with less than half of the reported class II alleles in the sub-Saharan region coming from southern Africa, data from AFND [35, 48].

Region	HLA loci
	A	B	C	DPA1	DPB1	DQA1	DPB1	DRB1
Australia	49	95	33		20	12	17	40
Europe	714	1121	387	16	137	47	89	602
N. Africa	982	1559	600		32	30	89	269
N. America	721	1166	390	7	74	29	93	574
N.E. Asia	262	477	131	12	78	47	57	318
S.Central America	121	288	59	12	78	28	60	549
S./S.E. Asia	407	731	227	10	99	21	64	280
Sub-Saharan Africa	154	313	94	12	87	23	48	220
W. Asia	215	366	167		29	21	57	138
Oceania	163	256	85	16	84	10	48	93
Southern Africa	131	291	54		21^a	8^a	20	58

N. Africa = North Africa, N. America = North America, N.E. Asia = North East Asia, S.Central America = South and Central America, S/S.E. Asia = South and South East Asia, and W. Asia = West Asia. No loci specific alleles were reported in this region in the AFND. ^aAlleles only reported in Zimbabwean black Shona population in the AFND.