Regarding “Recipients Receiving Better HLA-Matched Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation Grafts, Uncovered by a Novel HLA Typing Method, Have Superior Survival: A Retrospective Study”

The retrospective study by Mayor et al. [1] drew the attention of the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) Histocompatibility Advisory Group to the impact of third-generation DNA sequencing to evaluate HLA matching of unrelated donors and their recipients. The technology, sequencing of long, individual DNA fragments using a Pacific Biosystems platform, allows long-range phasing to define allelic sequences for all or most of each HLA gene. The term “ultra-high resolution” was used by the authors to describe the ability of the technology to provide the nucleotide sequence of all exons that encode the expressed extracellular domains of the mature protein and, in the case of HLA class I genes, the noncoding regions.