Characterization of hepatitis C virus deletion mutants circulating in chronically infected patients

S Noppornpanth, SL Smits, TX Lien… - Journal of …, 2007 - Am Soc Microbiol
S Noppornpanth, SL Smits, TX Lien, Y Poovorawan, ADME Osterhaus, BL Haagmans
Journal of virology, 2007Am Soc Microbiol
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) has a linear positive-stranded RNA genome of∼ 9,600 nucleotides
in length and displays a high level of sequence diversity caused by high mutation rates and
recombination. However, when we performed long distance reverse transcription-PCRs on
HCV RNA isolated from serum of chronic HCV patients, not only full-length HCV genomes
but also HCV RNAs which varied in size from 7,600 to 8,346 nucleotides and contained
large in-frame deletions between E1 and NS2 were amplified. Carefully designed control …
Abstract
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) has a linear positive-stranded RNA genome of ∼9,600 nucleotides in length and displays a high level of sequence diversity caused by high mutation rates and recombination. However, when we performed long distance reverse transcription-PCRs on HCV RNA isolated from serum of chronic HCV patients, not only full-length HCV genomes but also HCV RNAs which varied in size from 7,600 to 8,346 nucleotides and contained large in-frame deletions between E1 and NS2 were amplified. Carefully designed control experiments indicated that these deletion mutants are a bona fide natural RNA species, most likely packaged in virions. Moreover, deletion mutants were detected in sera of patients infected with different HCV genotypes. We observed that 7/37 (18.9%) of genotype 1, 5/43 (11.6%) of genotype 3, and 4/13 (30.7%) of genotype 6 samples contained HCV deletion mutant genomes. These observations further exemplify HCV's huge genetic diversity and warrant studies to explore their biological relevance.
American Society for Microbiology