The genetic polymorphism of the C81(α-γ) subunits and C82(β) subunit of the eighth component of complement in 510 healthy unrelated Korean were investigated, using isoelectric focusing followed by immunoblotting. Three common and four rare phenotypes were observed in C81 locus. the allele frequencies for C81*A, C81*B, C81*A1, C81*B1 AND C81*A2 were estimated to be 0.6294, 0.3588, 0.0069, 0.0020 and 0.0029, respectively. The gene frequencies of the common allele of C81 in Korean were similar to those for the other ethnic groups thus far reported. There were four phenotypes: C82A, C82AB, C82B and C8β chain null forms(C82AQ). The allele frequencies were estimated as follows: C82*A was 0.2255, C82*B was 0.7725 and C82*AQ was 0.0020. The distributions of C82 phenotypes and their respective allele frequencies were different from the data reported in Caucasian.