Currently, all blood utilised in transfusion is phenotype by serological means. As a consequence, blood is not phenotype for all clinically significant antigens and there is a real risk of patients becoming all immunised to incompatible blood units. The Blooded consortium proposes to demonstrate the use of molecular genetic techniques to genotype a large cohort of individuals drawn from across the EU in order to demonstrate the accuracy and improvement of this technology over standard serological testing. The project will utilise two novel technologies involving single-nucleotide polymorphism detection, on biochips and by using real-time flour-sequence specific primer PCR techniques. The project will use these two different technologies as one provides the ability to screen for large numbers of blood group alleles, whilst the other is able to test for a smaller number of alleles but with much higher throughput.