ORCID
- Michael McAuley: 0000-0003-2486-931X
Abstract
Human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes encode cell-surface proteins which play an important role in immunity. Since different HLA alleles enable different immune responses, the population frequency of HLA alleles is often considered when designing vaccines (Gulukota & DeLisi, 1996). Specific HLA alleles have been linked to autoimmune disease (Simmonds & Gough, 2007) and associated with adverse drug reactions (Fan et al., 2017). Further, the success of solid organ and stem cell transplants is related to HLA matching between donor and recipient (Fürst et al., 2019; Morishima et al., 2002). We present HLAfreq, a Python package which can be used to download, combine and analyse multiple HLA allele frequency datasets.
Keywords
HLA, Human leukocyte antigen, allele frequency, hierarchical Bayesian model, population genetics
DOI Link
Publication Date
2026-05-03
Publication Title
The Journal of Open Source Software
Volume
11
Issue
121
Deposit Date
2026-05-11
Funding
MM was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant QFPROBA (grant number 741487). DW is employed by Barinthus Biotherapeutics (UK) Ltd.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Wells, David A. and McAuley, Michael, "HLAfreq: Download and combine HLA allele frequency data" (2026). Research Outputs: 2025-Present. 3.
https://arrow.tudublin.ie/scschmatro/3