Autobiographical perspectives on HLA epitopes: Past, present and future.

This article describes my personal perspectives on HLA epitopes. It is not intended to be a general review of HLA epitopes as several versions have been published before. This article is an autobiographical reflection with three sections. The first part named "Past" is intended to show how traditional HLA typing and serological HLA data might be interpreted with epitopes. The second section named "Present" describes my experience with HLA epitopes including antibody verification and the concept of ^eplet load. The third part, "Future", expresses my (thoughts about HLA epitopes and their application in the clinical setting. The list of cited References includes publications selected from the HLAMatchmaker website www.epitopes.net. Most of these references have PDF documents than can be downloaded without charge.