Study On The Transactivating Function Of HBcAg Antigen

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is the prototypic member of the hepadnavirus family, which causes acute and chronic liver diseases, including chronic active hepatitis, as well as cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. HBV infects an estimated 200 million persons worldwide and thus represents a viral pandemic. HBcAg is a structural protein which encoded by C gene of HBV DNA and it located in the core of Dane particles. HBcAg plays an important role in virus replication, so it is one of the markers which means there has active replication of HBV. HBcAg has highly immunogen and HBcAg-specific CD4(+) T-cell responses are believed to play an important role in the control of human HBV infection.To explore the possible function of HBcAg after HBV infection, The recombined expression plasmid pcDNA3.1(-)-HBcAg was constructed, and HepG2 cells were transfected, and pcDNA3.1(-) empty vector was used as control. The mRNA was isolated from HepG2 cells transfected with pcDNA3.1(-)-HBcAg and pcDNA3.1(-) empty vector, respectively, and suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) method was employed to analyze the differentially expressedDNA sequence between the two groups. The obtained production was subcloned into T/A plasmid vectors to set up the subtractive library. Amplification of the library was carried out with E. coli strain JM109 in random. The cDNA was sequenced and analyzed in GenBank with Blast search after PCR. At the same time, Microarray was employed for detecting and analyzing of both mRNA from the HepG2 cells. The obtained sequences may be target genes transactivated by HBcAg, among which some genes coding proteins involved in cell signal transduction, cycle regulation, translation and synthesis of protein, metabolism , apoptosis, immunoregulation, and correlated with tumor.These may explain the possible mechanism of HBcAg in vivo.