Joint study of the associations of HLA-B and the transmembrane short tandem repeat polymorphism of MICA protein with alopecia areata shows independent associations of both with the disease.

BACKGROUND: Alopecia areata (AA) is a skin disease that produces hair loss in patches of skin. The underlying mechanism of AA is a loss of immune privilege of hair follicles, which are then attacked by natural killer (NK) cells. A previous genome-wide association study linked single nucleotide polymorphisms of the protein MHC class I chain-related A (MICA) to this disease. MICA is the ligand for the activating receptor NKG2D, expressed mainly by NK cells and CD8+ cytotoxic T cells. As the aforementioned study did not include short tandem repeats (STRs) of MICA, we decided to study these in relation to AA.

AIM: To study the association of STRs with AA, alongside that of human leucocyte antigen (HLA) locus B, which is closely linked to MICA.

METHODS: DNA amplicon size analysis was carried out, and HLA-B locus genomic typing was performed by PCR-sequence-specific oligonucleotide analysis.

RESULTS: We observed an association between AA and both MICA*009 and HLA-B14; associations were also observed between HLA-B alleles and MICA alleles, which have both been previously found to be connected with AA, but never studied together.

CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that it is important to study HLA-B and MICA together to avoid the influence of their association in experiments in which they are investigated separately.