A Preliminary Immunogenetics Study Of A Kenyan Population Of Came1us Dromedarius

Abstract

The study consisted of developing camel blood typing reagents using non-immune, isoimmune and heteroimmune sera. Of the. three, only heteroirrmunization using rabbits as recipients produced antisera designated as anti-193, anti-7 and anti-123 according to the numbers of the donor camels which were from the Galana ranch. No antibodies were detected in the non-immune or the isoimmune sera. Using the thus developed reagents, the direct saline agglutination test was used to type 158 camels from Galana ranch, 31 from Isiolo and 11 from Kabete. The first two populations were Somali camels while the last population consisted of camels of Somali/Rendille breed. The three serological factors involved were named A, B and C giving eight possible phenotypes, A, B, C, AB, AC, BC, ABC and O. The most common phenotype was 0, the absence of any of the three factors, while the least common was C. The highest titre observed was 1:125 in anti-. 6 sera with cells from Galana camel number 148. No inheritance pattern of these three factors was suggested due to a lack of parentage information. Only camel and sheep cells were agglutinated by unabsorbed heteroimmune sera suggesting more similarities between camel and sheep f'actors than between camel and cattle, and camel and man for these unanalysed specificities.