Establishment of an inducible HBV stable cell line that expresses cccDNA-dependent epitope-tagged HBeAg for screening of cccDNA modulators.

ABSTRACT: Hepatitis B virus (HBV) covalently closed circular (ccc) DNA is essential to the virus life cycle, its elimination during chronic infection is considered critical to a durable therapy but has not been achieved by current antivirals. Despite being essential, cccDNA has not been the major target of high throughput screening (HTS), largely because of the limitations of current HBV tissue culture systems, including the impracticality of detecting cccDNA itself. In response to this need, we have previously developed a proof-of-concept HepDE19 cell line in which the production of wildtype e antigen (HBeAg) is dependent upon cccDNA. However, the existing assay system is not ideal for HTS because the HBeAg ELISA cross reacts with a viral HBeAg homologue, which is the core antigen (HBcAg) expressed

SUBMITTER: Cai D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5060949 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature