• SEROLOGICAL TEST METHOD
    Though it has been used to be the 'gold' standard, it is now being superseded by molecular biological methods as they become more precise and time efficient.
  • MOLECULAR BIOLOGICAL TEST METHOD
    Under rapid development and widely accepted in various laboratories.


  • Complement-mediated Microlymphocytotoxicity
  • Easy to test without necessity of expensive equipments.
  • High-quality serum required to obtain low resolution results and reliable results
  • Large volume of blood & viable lymphocytes is required.
  • Difficult to find high-quality serum for detecting rare antigens found in different races.


  • PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) has typically been used
  • All of the molecular methods require good quality genomic DNA
  • Requires extra primers to be used
  • Sequence of alleles must be known


  • SSO: sequence specific oligonucleotide
  • reverse SSO hybridization
  • RFLP: restriction fragment length polymorphism
  • SSCP: sequence specific conformational polymorphism
  • SSP: sequence specific primer (currently applied)
  • SBT: sequence-based typing (currently applied)
  • Recently, SPREX(Sequence specific Primer Refractory Extension) chips and real-time PCR methods have independently been developed and used for HLA test.