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Detection and significance of a G1862T variant of hepatitis B virus in Chinese patients with fulminant hepatitis

Department of Infectious Diseases, Nanfang Hospital, The First Medical College of PLA, Guangzhou 510515, China¹
Department of Medicine A, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, St Mary's Campus, South Wharf Road, London W2 1NY, UK²
You’an Hospital for Infectious Diseases, Beijing, China³
Fuzhou Hospital for Infectious Diseases, Fuzhou, China⁴

Author for correspondence: Peter Karayiannis. Fax +44 207 724 9369. e-mail p.karayiannis{at}ic.ac.uk

The prevalence of a G1862T variant of hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been investigated in patients with fulminant hepatitis and chronic liver disease, using primer mismatch amplification, followed by restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis. This variant was five times more common in patients with fulminant hepatitis (13·7%, 7 of 52) than in chronic carriers (2·5%, 2 of 81). The GT substitution at position 1862 leads to an amino acid change in codon 17 of the precore protein of the virus, which is part of a signal peptidase recognition motif. Variants with this mutation were only seen in patients infected with genotype B. In vitro translation experiments showed that this variant has greatly reduced capacity to produce hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg) from its precore protein precursor. Furthermore, 88·5% of patients with fulminant hepatitis had mutations that are known to be associated with abrogated or reduced production of HBeAg. This suggests that, following HBV infection, the absence or reduced amounts of HBeAg may be a contributing factor in fulminant disease.

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