Preliminary study on hepatitis B virus quasispecies in a patient with chronic hepatitis B / 中华肝脏病杂志

ABSTRACT

<p><b>OBJECTIVE</b>To investigate whether the hepatitis B virus (HBV) has quasispecies character by studying nucleotide sequence polymorphism and mutation features of HBV PreC/C gene region, and preliminaryly explore the heterogeneity of HBV quasispecies.</p><p><b>METHODS</b>The serum sample was obtained from a patient with chronic hepatitis B, and the whole HBV PreC/C gene region was amplified by PCR and cloned. Thirty-four clones that contained HBV PreC/C gene fragments were sequenced.</p><p><b>RESULTS</b>There were 28 kinds of different nucleotide sequences in 34 clones, and the nucleotide sequences diversity ranged from 0.2% to 2.1%. The mutation points were almost distributed in the whole region, but there wasn't mutation at PreC region nt.1 896 point in all sequences.</p><p><b>CONCLUSION</b>Hepatitis B virus has complex quasispecies character in the patients with chronic hepatitis B.</p>