High-resolution quantification of hepatitis C virus genome-wide mutation load and its correlation with the outcome of peginterferon-alpha2a and ribavirin combination therapy.

ABSTRACT: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a highly mutable RNA virus and circulates as a heterogeneous population in individual patients. The magnitude of such population heterogeneity has long been proposed to be linked with diverse clinical phenotypes, including antiviral therapy. Yet data accumulated thus far are fairly inconclusive. By the integration of long RT-PCR with 454 sequencing, we have built a pipeline optimized for the quantification of HCV genome-wide mutation load at 1% resolution of mutation frequency, followed by a retrospective study to examine the role of HCV mutation load in peginterferon-alpha2a and ribavirin combination antiviral therapy. Genome-wide HCV mutation load varied widely with a range from 92 to 1639 mutations and presented a Poisson distribution among 56 patients (Kolmog

SUBMITTER: Wang W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4065037 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature