HBV DNA genome co-transfection procedure for the evaluation of relative fitness

SEVIC, INA; GONZALEZ LOPEZ LEDESMA, MARIA MORA; FLICHMAN, DIEGO MARTIN; CAMPOS, RODOLFO HECTOR

PLOS ONE

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

Año: 2017 vol. 12

1932-6203

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is an important global health problem with an estimated 240 million individuals chronically infected worldwide. These patients have a higher probability of developing liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma, which causes more than 686 000 deaths annually.HBV exists in form of quasispecies. Viral quasispecies are the collections of closely related viral genomes subjected to a continuous process of competition among the variants and selection of the fittest variant in a given environment. This process has been difficult to study considering that HBV, in contrast to many other viruses, does not have a cell culture system that allows efficient in vitro infection and passaging of virus. The development of an efficientco-transfection method for the evaluation of relative fitness of HBV variants would be a useful tool to improve the knowledge of HBV infection process.In this work, we develop an efficient HBV DNA genome co-transfection procedure for the evaluation of relative fitness and use it to evaluate the impact of mutations in basic core promoter (BCP) and pre core (pC) regions fixed during the seroconversion process, and the relative fitness of (sub) genotypes (sgt) that are currently prevalent in Argentina.