Nomenclature for factors of the swine leukocyte antigen class II system, 2005

A systematic nomenclature for the genes and alleles of the swine major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is essential to the development and communication of research in swine immunology. The Swine Leukocyte Antigen (SLA) Nomenclature Committee of the International Society for Animal Genetics (ISAG) has reviewed all of the DNA-sequence information for MHC class II genes, available in GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ databases, and the associated published reports to develop such a systematic nomenclature. This article summarizes the proposed nomenclature, which parallels the World Health Organization's nomenclature for factors of the human MHC. The SLA class II genes expressed on the cell membrane will be noted as SLA-DRA, SLA-DRB1, SLA-DQA, and SLA-DQB1. Nomenclature assignments for all SLA class II GenBank sequences are now noted. The committee will add new SLA class II allele designations, as they are discovered, and will maintain a publicly available list of all recognized genes and alleles using the Immuno Polymorphism Database (IPD). The sequences will be available from the IPD-MHC section of the database which contains non-human MHC sequences (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ipd/mhc/sla/).