UNLABELLED Hepatitis C virus (HCV) envelope glycoproteins E1 and E2 form a heterodimer and mediate receptor interactions and viral fusion. Both E1 and E2 are targets of the neutralizing antibody (NAb) response and are candidates for the production of vaccines that generate humoral immunity. Previous studies demonstrated that N-terminal hypervariable region 1 (HVR1) can modulate the neutralizati...

Background. Chronic hepatitis B (CHB) remains a severe global public health concern. Hepatitis B virus (HBV) can be divided into 8 genotypes with different geographical distribution and virological features. We demonstrated genotypes B and C prevalent in southern and northern China, respectively, had divergent genotype-dependent amino acid polymorphisms and variations in reverse transcriptase (...

Background: Biallelic polymorphism of A/G variation at position 308 in the promoter region of TNF-α gene is an important genetic factor causing high TNF-α transcription which could influence the clinical outcome of atherosclerosis. Studies have also implicated the role of NF-κB in atherogenesis by regulating genes involved in the inflammatory response and insulin sensitivity. Material and Metho...

The p7 protein of hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a viroporin that is dispensable for viral genome replication but plays a critical role in virus morphogenesis. In this study, we generated a JFH1-based intergenotypic chimeric genome that encoded a heterologous genotype 1b (GT1b) p7. The parental intergenotypic chimeric genome was nonviable in human hepatoma cells, and infectious chimeric virions wer...

Background. Chronic hepatitis B (CHB) remains a severe global public health concern. Hepatitis B virus (HBV) can be divided into 8 genotypes with different geographical distribution and virological features. We demonstrated genotypes B and C prevalent in southern and northern China, respectively, had divergent genotype-dependent amino acid polymorphisms and variations in reverse transcriptase (...

The Hepatitis C virus E1 and E2 envelope proteins are the major players in all events required for virus entry into target cells. In addition, the recently developed HCV cell culture system has indicated that E1E2 heterodimer formation is a prerequisite for viral particle production. In this paper, we explored a new genetic approach to construct intergenotypic 2a/1b chimeras, maintaining the st...

Efficient in vitro systems to study the life cycle of hepatitis C virus (HCV) were recently developed for JFH1 (genotype 2a), which has unique replication capacity in Huh7 cells. We developed 4a/JFH1 intergenotypic recombinants containing the structural genes (Core, E1, and E2), p7, and all or part of NS2 of the 4a prototype strain ED43 that, after transfection of Huh7.5 cells with RNA transcri...

Feldgarden and Yund (1) recently re-examined a question central to understanding the evolution of allorecognition systems in colonial and clonal marine invertebrates: “How does the genetic polymorphism necessary to restrict intergenotypic fusion to kin and clonemates accumulate in natural populations?” They argue that explanations invoking kin selection account fully for neither the extensive a...