The Study On The HBV Quasispecies Characteristic And The Correlation Between It And INF-α Treatment

Quasispecies are a conception that is used to describe the genetic heterogeneity of same organism, it was first advanced by Eigen. In the research field of virology, quasispecies are used to describe the heterogeneity of same virus in an infected individuality. It has been confirmed that quasispecies characteristic is the general biology characteristic all RNA virus possessed. The study on hepatitis B virus (HBV) quasispecies has be also gradually considered to be important in recent years. It has been indicated that the studies about the forming cause of HBV quasispecies and the correlation between HBV quasispecies forming and the clinical manifestation has important research significance, and the studies on the importance and effect of selective action of immune pressure and antiviral drugs in the course of HBV quasispecies forming, on the correlation between the course of HBV quasispecies forming and acute HBV infection become chronic, and on the correlation between the course of HBV quasispecies forming and the clinical prognosis of chronic HBV infection will provide important clues for exploring treatment method of anti-HBV infection. HBV possesses quassispecies characteristic may be a very important virological factor that bring about chronic hepatitis B and failure in antiviral treatment.Interferon-alpha (INF- a ) is still the main drug for treatment HBV infection as far, but among patients treated, loss of HBV DNA and HBeAg is only 20% higher than among controls, whereas the loss of HBsAg is only 5-6% higher. The influential factors remain unknown. Except the factors from the hosts, in the viral field, recently researches focused attention on the viral mutation. Among which, the mainly studies were on mutation of the coding and regulatory regions ofHBeAg and HBcAg. The correlation between varied variants and the response to INF- a treatment have been reported. Additionally, it has been observed that different HBV genotypes have different responsive rate to INF- a treatment. But the related study about HBV quasispecies hasn't been yet reported at present.In this paper, to preliminary investigate whether HBV has quasispecies characteristic and the quasispecies heterogeneity in the patient with chronic HBV infection, the experimental procedure, PCR-T vector clone-nucleotide sequence analysis, was first employed. One serum sample was obtained from a patient with chronic hepatitis B, and whole C-ORF region of HBV was amplified by PCR and cloned. Random selected 34 clones from this serum were examined by nucleotide sequence analysis; second, to satisfy the need of detection a lot of virogene sequences in the study of HBV quasispecies. The conformation sensitive gel electrophoresis (CSGE) to fit for detection of HBV quasispecies was established; Final, CSGE was applied to study the relationship between HBV quasispecies heterogeneity and response to IFN-