The sequencing of macaques from different geographic areas has shown that each population has its own characteristic set of Mamu/Mafa-A and -B alleles, and only a few alleles are shared between cohorts/populations (Krebs et al. 2005; Otting et al. 2008; Campbell et al. 2009 ). This is in contrast to the data that were observed for the MHC class II sequences obtained from these species (Otting et al. 2002; Doxiadis et al. 2006; O'Connor et al. 2007; de Groot et al. 2008) . Moreover, the interspecies sharing of MHC class I alleles in rhesus and cynomolgus macaques is in the same order of magnitude as the intraspecies sharing (Otting et al. 2007) .