THE STUDY ON QUASISPECIES OF HEPATITIS B VIRUS : PRE-CORE/CORE GENE AS AN EXAMPLE / 解放军医学杂志

ABSTRACT

To investigate the HBV quasispecies groups in the patients with chronic HBV infection. A set of specific primers was synthesized according to HBV DNA sequence of the Chinese strain, and the whole pre core/core region was amplified by PCR method from the serum of 4 patients with chronic HBV infection.Then the PCR products were subcloned into pGEM Teasy vectors. Clones were selected to be sequenced,and then sequence comparison was made to find the difference. Each sequence of selected clones was found to be different. The homology of the nucleic acid sequence from the same patient was above 98 0%. There were many mutation types in this region, including point substitution, core region internal deletion, as well as frame shift reading. The results indicated that there were HBV quasispecies groups in chronically infected patients. The mutation in this region may influence the prognosis of HBV infection.