Hepatitis Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Hepatitis, including details on hepatitis a, b, c, causes, symptoms.

New complex recombinant genotype of hepatitis B virus identified in Vietnam.

Tran TT, Trinh TN, Abe K

Department of Pathology, National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Toyama 1-23-1, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 162-8640, Japan.

A novel variant of hepatitis B virus was identified in Vietnam. This strain (HBV-VH24) had a novel intergenotypic recombination between genotypes A, C, and G. VH24 showed high similarity (98.3 to 98.9%) to the "aberrant strains" among Vietnamese isolates reported by Hannoun et al. (C. Hannoun et al., J. Gen. Virol. 81:2267-2272, 2000) and also had similar breakpoints of recombination. Phylogenetic analysis of the complete genome of these strains formed a separate clade. Furthermore, their pre-S/S gene-encoded seven unique conserved amino acid residues were not present in other genotypes. These findings support the designation of the new genotype I.

Published 15 May 2008 in J Virol, 82(11): 5657-63.
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