Sequence analysis of putative structural regions of hepatitis C virus isolated from 5 patients.

概要

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Genomes of hepatitis C virus (HCV) have been reported to have divergence among nations or individuals. We cloned and sequenced the structural regions of HCV isolated from 5 Japanese patients with liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma, and compared those with other clones reported in Japan and in the United States. The 5' non-coding region is very conserved and the core region is relatively conserved among the all clones. In contrast, the envelope region (E1, NS1/E2) was not so conserved between Japanese clones and American's clone. Furthermore, we recognized two hypervariable regions (HV1, HV2) in NS1/E2. The hydrophobicity analysis of these regions, however, showed that there are almost idenitcal hydrophilic portions in HV1 and HV2. The secondary structure analysis of the proteins showed that all isolates have identical turn structure in the portions.<BR>These data suggested that the regions may play an important role in the immunoreactions as reported in human immunodeficiency virus.