RESUMO
OBJECTIVE: To investigate Diego blood group alleles in the Chinese Korean population. The Diego blood group system plays an important role in transfusion medicine, but the distribution of the blood group in many Chinese ethnic populations remains unclear. METHODS: Sequence Specific Primer Polymerase Chain Reaction (SSP-PCR) was used for Diego genotyping and sequence-based typing PCR (PCR-SBT) was used to verify single nucleotide polymorphisms in the coding region of SLC4A1 starting from exon 19. Nine hundred and ten samples from the Chinese Korean population were investigated. RESULTS: The frequency of the DI*01 and DI*02 alleles in the Chinese Korean population was 0.0516 and 0.9484, respectively. The most predominant genotype was DI*02/DI*02, with a frequency of 90.22 % (821/910). The frequency of DI*01/DI*02 was 9.23 % (84/910) and that of DI*01 /DI*01 was 0.55 % (5/910). The genotype distributions of the Diego blood group conformed to the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (P > 0.05). CONCLUSION: The data obtained from this study will be helpful for the creation of a donor database to provide antigen-negative blood to patients with allo-antibodies. Genotyping can be used as a substitute for the serological technique when antisera are unavailable and is suitable for screening a large number of donors for rare-blood-group databases.