Identification of four SB antigens by cloned cells. Population studies of Norwegians.

By priming in vitro with allogeneic HLA-DR compatible and also HLA-A,B mostly compatible lymphoid cells, PLT cells resulted in recognizing a group of non D/DR allelic antigens provisionally named K, L, M and N. To improve discrimination these bulk primed typing reagents were cloned and expanded. By typing of previously SB typed lymphoblastoid B cell lines (LCL) the provisional specificities could be identified as SB1, 4, 3 and 2, respectively. Typing of 186 unrelated Norwegians gave the following gene frequences: SB1: 0.05, SB2: 0.16, SB3: 0.13, SB4: 0.42 and SB blank: 0.24. No triplets were found, the calculated gene frequencies fit with Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, and typing of a B-DR recombinant family confirmed that the SB locus is situated centromeric to B. Associations between SB and A, B, DR antigens in the same material were generally weak, the most significant associations found were between SB1-DR3 and SB4-DR2.