Assessing in vivo mutation frequencies and creating a high-resolution genome-wide map of fitness costs of Hepatitis C virus.

ABSTRACT: Like many viruses, Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) has a high mutation rate, which helps the virus adapt quickly, but mutations come with fitness costs. Fitness costs can be studied by different approaches, such as experimental or frequency-based approaches. The frequency-based approach is particularly useful to estimate in vivo fitness costs, but this approach works best with deep sequencing data from many hosts are. In this study, we applied the frequency-based approach to a large dataset of 195 patients and estimated the fitness costs of mutations at 7957 sites along the HCV genome. We used beta regression and random forest models to better understand how different factors influenced fitness costs. Our results revealed that costs of nonsynonymous mutations were three times higher than those of

SUBMITTER: Tisthammer KH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9113599 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature