HLA imputation via IBD
The Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) genes play a major role in adaptive immune response and are used to differentiale self cells from non self cells. HLA genes are hyper variable with nearly evrery locus containing over a dozen alleles. This variation plays an important role in autoimmune diesease and organ transplantation. HLA typing by serological methods is time consuming and expensive. We present a new computational method to infer per-locus HLA types using shared segments Identical By Descent (IBD), inferred from genotype data.
The program has been developed in Itsik Pe'er's Lab of Computational Genetics at Columbia University. It is built in Java 1.5 and tested in the Red Hat Linux environment; the source is distributed here in a tar.gz package under the GPL license.