Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2022 Feb 21;10(2):339. doi: 10.3390/vaccines10020339

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

© 2022 by the authors.

Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

PMC Copyright notice

Diagrammatic illustration of the four different Faces of HLA class-I. Face-1 is the conventional cell surface HLA-I formed by dimerization of heavy chain with β2-microglobulin, hence referred to as heterodimer or closed conformer. The peptide binding grove is located in between α1 and α2 helices of the single heavy chain of HLA-I. Face-2 consists of heavy chain without β2-microglobulin. It is also known as open conformer. The figure illustrates linearized version but it is oriented conformationally. Face-3 is a consequence of homodimerization of two heavy chains of the same alleles, while Face-4 is a result of dimerization of two heavy chains of different alleles of HLA-I isomers.