Evolution of hepatitis C virus over the course of two liver transplantations
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a hepatotropic virus with a positive sense RNA genome. Due to is errorprone replication cycle, the HCV genome has a high mutation rate with HCV forming a so called quasispecies of slightly differing viruses within the patient. Here, the virus population derived from patient serum samples was characterised in a patient who received two liver transplantations. HCV RNA was isolated from the sera, converted into cDNA and amplified via PCR. These amplicons were sequenced using the MiSeq v2 (2x250bp) platform (Illumina) with an average sequencing depth of ~4000 reads The viral quasispecies from before and after each liver transplantation was analysed.