A study on the quasispecies character of 3′untranlated region in hepatitis C virus / 中国医师杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To investigate the the quasispecies character of 3′ untranlated region(3′ UTR) in hepatitis C virus(HCV) by analysing the nucleotide sequence polymorphism and mutation features in 3′ UTR region.Methods Patients infected with genotype 1b HCV were identified by reverse transcription-nested polymerase chain reaction(RT-PCR) and restriction fragment length polymorphism(RFLP) assay.Fragments of the cDNA of 3′ UTR were amplified using semi-nested RT-PCR,and subjected to cloning.The 12-15 clones that contained HCV 3′UTR gene fragments amplified from each patients were sequenced.Results The full-length sequence of 1b genotype HCV 3′UTR in cDNA were obtained.The 3′UTR region consists of four elements the 5′ region,the poly(U),poly(U/C) and 98-base region.The nucleotide sequence diversity ranged from 0.2%～2.1% and the mutation points were almost distributed in the the 5′region and poly(U/C).Conclusions The HCV has complex quasispecies character in 3′ UTR.