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AN ELECTRONIC MESSAGING FORMAT FOR IMMUNOGENETIC DATA.
Martin Maiers and Michelle Setterholm . ¹ IS, National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), Minneapolis, MN, USA .

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Currently all HLA typing techniques produce results which may not identify a single allele but produce a list of possible alleles. This situation is compounded by the ongoing discovery of new alleles. Coding systems have emerged to represent lists of HLA alleles with various alphabetical strings (allele codes) but this is unsatisfactory since, in the case of a list of possible genotypes, the allele codes over-represent the combinations which can decrease the specificity of typing. All nomenclature-based reporting methods fail to immortalize the data in the context of the publication of new alleles. The collection and utilization of primary HLA typing data can alleviate both issues.
To facilitate electronic messaging of HLA typing results, the NMDP Bioinformatics group has developed an XML-based format called HML (Histo-immunogenetics markup language). The HML format is a general-purpose format that can be used to represent HLA data or other loci/markers (KIR, cytokine polymorphisms, microsatellites). HML allows reporting of HLA results using only WHO nomenclature. Ambiguities (lists of possible alleles) are represented explicitly as haploid ambiguities and additionally as diploid (genotype list) ambiguities. The message format describes a standard for representing the results of all genetic tests performed to generate the typing results including the antigens and alleles and the primary data from which these results were derived. Typing methods currently supported include SSOP, SSP, and SBT. It also allows explicit association of typing results based on a combination of typing methods.
This electronic format has been proposed as an open, community standard. Feedback and comments are invited at http://www.nmdpresearch.org/HLA/HML/hml_idx.html