More than 82,000 donors have been recruited from January through April 2015 by DKMS in Germany and typed for absence or presence of 17 KIR genes and pseudogenes using an NGS-based amplicon approach targeting exons 4, 5, and 7 of the respective genes. While KIR2DL5A and KIR2DL5B genes are not distinguished, KIR2DS4 and KIR2DS4N are reported separately, as null alleles are not biologically functional. Frequencies are given by the relative fraction of typing results.
70,411 of the donors recruited indicated to be of German descent, 4989 of Turkish and 860 of Polish descent. The most common KIR genotype in all 3 ethnicities includes the presence of only 2DL1, 2DL3, 2DL4, 2DP1, 2DS4N, 3DL1, 3DL2, 3DL3, and 3DP1 genes. For all populations, the most frequent KIR genotype, according to the classification of Cooley et al., is B/2, while B/4 is most rare.