[Preliminary study on hepatitis B virus quasispecies in a patient with chronic hepatitis B].
OBJECTIVE
To investigate whether the hepatitis B virus (HBV) has quasispecies character by studying nucleotide sequence polymorphism and mutation features of HBV PreC/C gene region, and preliminaryly explore the heterogeneity of HBV quasispecies.


METHODS
The serum sample was obtained from a patient with chronic hepatitis B, and the whole HBV PreC/C gene region was amplified by PCR and cloned. Thirty-four clones that contained HBV PreC/C gene fragments were sequenced.


RESULTS
There were 28 kinds of different nucleotide sequences in 34 clones, and the nucleotide sequences diversity ranged from 0.2% to 2.1%. The mutation points were almost distributed in the whole region, but there wasn't mutation at PreC region nt.1 896 point in all sequences.


CONCLUSIONS
Hepatitis B virus has complex quasispecies character in the patients with chronic hepatitis B.
Lan
Lin
L
Institute of Infectious Diseases of the People's Liberation Army, Southwest Hospital, Third Military Medical University, Chongqing 400038, China.
Wang
Yu-ming
YM
Huang
Yan-ping
YP
D000328:Adult; D006512:Hepatitis B Core Antigens / Q000235:genetics* / Q000276:immunology; D006515:Hepatitis B virus / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics* / Q000302:isolation & purification; D019694:Hepatitis B, Chronic / Q000821:virology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009154:Mutation; D011401:Promoter Regions, Genetic / Q000235:genetics; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
D006512:Hepatitis B Core Antigens