The rhesus (Rh) blood group antigens are of considerable importance in transfusion medicine as well as in newborn or autoimmune hemolytic diseases due to their high antigenicity. We identified a major DNaseI hypersensitive site at the 5¢ flanking regions of bothRHDandRHCEexon 1. A 34 bp fragment located at)191 to)158 from a translation start posi-tion, and containing the TCCCCTCCC sequence, was involved in enhan-cing promoter activity, which was assessed by luciferase reporter gene assay.
