We examined the utility of an immunohistochemical method, which uses commercially available anti-A and anti-B monoclonal antibodies and biotinylated tyramide, for ABO blood grouping from nails. Nail samples were obtained from 164 healthy adult volunteers whose ABO blood groups were known (group A: n=72, group B: n=35, group O: n=43, group AB: n=14), and from 14 autopsy cases with postmortem intervals of 10 days to 6 months. In all of the nail samples from the volunteers, ABO blood group was accurately determined by the immunohistochemical method. In the postmortem samples, no discrepancy was observed between the results of ABO phenotyping by this method and those of ABO genotyping by PCR-RFLP. The present method is highly sensitive and needs no standard erythrocytes; results can be obtained within 3 to 4 hours. Our method may be more advantageous than conventional absorption-elution test for ABO blood grouping from nails for forensic science.
