A total of 280 persons were HLA-DQA1 typed by two different polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based methods; (i) a reverse dot-blot (RDB) method, which can differentiate between six alleles, and (ii) a combined PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) and allele-specific amplification (ASA) method, which together recognise eight alleles. In 146 unrelated Danish individuals, the HLA-DQA1 alleles were in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. For identity testing, the power of discrimination (PD) of HLA-DQA1 was 0.932 with the RDB method and 0.942 with the PCR-RFLP/ASA method. For paternity testing, the theoretical chance of exclusion in HLA-DQA1 of non-fathers was 0.634 with the RDB method and 0.660 with the PCR-RFLP/ASA method.