Association of HLA-DQBl Allelic Sequence Variation with Susceptibility to Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Systemic lupus erythematosus (sle) is an autoimmune disease in which polymorphismswithin the human leukocyte antigen (hla) region have been associated to its etiology. weconducted this study to compare the hla-dqb1 allelic sequence variation among slepatients and controls in the northeast of iran.genomic dna of 40 sle patients and 83 healthy controls were amplified by polymerasechain reaction with sequence-specific primers technique (per-ssp). seven serologicalsubclasses of the hla dqb1 were detected.allele distribution comparison showed in the sle group a significant increase of hladq6 (*0601-*0609) (p=0'()06); whereas alleles hla dq7 (*0301-*0304) were significantlydecreased (p=0.005). combination of dq5 (*0501-*0504)-dq6 (*0601-*0609) wasincreased in patients.these results suggest th'at dq6 is the dominant hla dqb1 allele probably associatedwith genetic susceptibility to sle in the northeast of iran. the association supports theimportance of ethnic background and indicates the importance of various genes that hasbeen observed in different sle populations.