Archives of Virology

, Volume 160, Issue 10, pp 2479–2482 | Cite as

Variation analysis of E1 and E2 in HCV subtypes

  • Xue-Di Cheng
  • Hua-Feng Xu
  • Xue-Mei Wei
  • Hai-Zhou Zhou
Original Article
First Online:
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Accepted:

Abstract

Pegylated interferon and ribavirin combination therapy effectively suppresses viral replication in 50 %–60 % of hepatitis C virus (HCV)-infected patients. However, HCV-infected patients often display varied responses to therapy, and strains of subtype lb (the most widespread HCV subtype worldwide) have more-severe clinical manifestations, greater viral loads, and poorer responses to interferon treatment. Therefore, understanding the genomic variability of HCV is crucial to treatment of HCV infection. In this study, we used the appropriate software to analyze the nucleotide, and amino acid sequences of the envelope proteins (E1 and E2) of HCV to investigate the extent of their variability in several HCV subtypes (1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 3a, 4a, 5a and 6a) and calculated the ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous substitutions (dN/dS) in these proteins to investigate the immunological pressure acting on them. We also predicted the N-glycosylation sites in E1 and E2 to determine their association with viral neutralization. We found that E1 is more variable, has a higher dN/dS ratio, and has more N-glycosylation sites than E2 in HCV subtype 1b. This indicates that the variability of E1, its dN/dS ratio, and its degree of N-glycosylation might play an important role in the treatment of infection with HCV subtype 1b.

Keywords

Normalize Shannon Entropy 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

Compliance with ethical standards

Conflict of interest

On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Wien 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Xue-Di Cheng
    • 1
  • Hua-Feng Xu
    • 2
  • Xue-Mei Wei
    • 1
  • Hai-Zhou Zhou
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Laboratory DiagnosisThe First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical UniversityHarbinPeople’s Republic of China
  2. 2.Genomics CenterHarbin Medical UniversityHarbinPeople’s Republic of China

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