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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2009 Jun 22.
Published in final edited form as: Bone Marrow Transplant. 2008 Aug 4;42(6):365–377. doi: 10.1038/bmt.2008.215

Figure 1.

Figure 1

Interactions between inhibitory killer immunoglobulin-like receptors (iKIRs) and their HLA ligands of relevance to natural killer (NK) cell alloreactivity after allo-SCT. For convenience, a single NK cell expressing four distinct iKIRs is shown. Each NK cell need only express one molecular species of iKIR for functional maturation to occur. High resolution HLA typing is required to determine whether specific alleles of HLA-B and HLA-Cw are ligands of specific iKIRs. Group 2 HLA-C alleles (C2; for example, -Cw2, -Cw4, -Cw5 and -Cw6) are the ligands for KIR2DL1, whereas group 1 HLA-C alleles (C1; for example, -Cw1, -Cw3, -Cw7, -Cw8) are the ligands for KIR2DL2 and KIR2DL3. High resolution typing of HLA-B and -Cw loci are incorporated into the ligand incompatibility, receptor-ligand and missing ligand models of NK cell alloreactivity (Figure 2). Interactions between KIR3DL2 and HLA-A3 or -A11 are generally not considered in these models.