In animal cells, small interfering RNAs (siRNA), when exogenously provided, have been reported to be capable of inhibiting replication of several different viruses. In preliminary studies, siRNA species were designed and tested for their ability to act on the protein expressed in Huh7 cells transfected with DNA-directed mRNA constructs containing hepatitis delta virus (HDV) target sequences. Th...

In models of the replication of human hepatitis delta virus (HDV) RNA, it is generally assumed that circular RNAs are the only templates. However, noncircular HDV RNAs are also produced during replication, and it is known that replication can be initiated by transfection with noncircular RNAs. Therefore, strategies were devised to determine the relative ability of different HDV RNA species to i...

None of the mutations so far discovered in several hepatitis delta virus (HDV) isolates appears to determine important changes in HDV specific protein (HDAg) expression, except for a putative mutation at nucleotide 1012 converting an amber stop codon (TAG) to a codon for tryptophan (TGG). Here we present the characterization of an HDV obtained from the liver of a woodchuck inoculated with sera ...

Hepatitis delta virus (HDV) is a defective RNA virus that has an absolute requirement for a virus belonging to the hepadnaviridae family like hepatitis B virus (HBV) for its replication and formation of new virions. HDV infection is usually associated with a worsening of HBV-induced liver pathogenesis, which leads to more frequent cirrhosis, increased risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), and...

Human hepatitis delta virus (HDV) is the only animal virus known to replicate its RNA genome using a host polymerase because its only virally encoded proteins, the small and large hepatitis delta antigens (HDAg-S and HDAg-L), lack polymerase activity. Although this makes HDV an ideal model system to study RNA-directed transcription in mammalian cells, little is known about the host factors invo...

Hepatitis delta virus (HDV) causes both acute and chronic liver disease throughout the world. Effective medical therapy is lacking. Previous work has shown that the assembly of HDV virus-like particles (VLPs) could be abolished by BZA-5B, a compound with farnesyltransferase inhibitory activity. Here we show that FTI-277, another farnesyltransferase inhibitor, prevented the production of complet...

Hepatitis Delta virus (HDV) is a degenerate RNA virus or virusoid and a satellite of Hepatitis B virus (HBV). Three distinct genotypes are described for HDV; genotype I is distributed worldwide but other genotypes appear to be more restricted geographically. In the present study, an RT-nested PCR method was set up to detect delta infection from serum samples. Moreover, the target amplified sequ...

Human hepatitis delta virus (HDV) is the smallest RNA virus in genome. HDV genome is divided into a viroid-like sequence and a protein-coding sequence which could have originated from different resources and the HDV genome was eventually constituted through RNA recombination. The genome subsequently diversified through accumulation of mutations selected by interactions between the mutated RNA a...

We have investigated the extent of hepatitis delta virus (HDV) genetic variability after serial passages in chimpanzees and woodchucks and between different human isolates. A complete HDV genome, isolated from a woodchuck liver, was cloned after five serial transmissions. The 1679 nucleotide long genome revealed only point mutations and a nucleotide divergence of 0.65% and 0.89% with previously...

Hemophilia A and B patients seen at nine US regional treatment centers were tested for serologic markers of hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), and hepatitis delta virus (HDV) during 1987 and 1988. Because human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, a potentially confounding variable, was present in 53% of the group, the population was divided by HIV status for analysis purposes...