实验动物总则

T-cells are the key players in the field on which the virus and the immune response try to defeat or at least control each other. Two categories of T-cells are involved: CD4+ and CD8+ T-cells. CD4+ and CD8+ T-cells have different characteristics and functions and different roles in the immune response to vir ...

Cellular immune responses, especially those mediated by cytotoxic T-lymphocytes (CTLs), are an important component of the host immune response in many viral infections. For many years, it has been observed that CD8+ cells were present in large numbers in the liver of patients with chronic HCV (1 ...

The host immune response to hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection comprises both humoral and cellular components, which accompany all viral infections. The cellular immune response involves both nonspecific and antigen-specific phases, with recovery thought to be largely dependent ...

Human monoclonal antibodies (hMAb) provide novel ways to probe the B-cell repertoire in health and disease. However, the development of hMAb technology has met with several difficulties owing to the instability of the cell lines, the low level of specific antibody secretion, and the poor clon ...

Because of the very low level of HCV present in the serum of infected individuals, as well as the low level of replication in the host, reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assays are the only method suitable for the routine detection of HCV RNA. The use of RT-PCR to monitor HCV repli ...

Hepatitis C virus (HCV), the genome of which was molecularly cloned in the US and Japan, causes most, if not all, cases of posttransfusional non-A, non-B hepatitis (NANBH) and nearly half those of sporadic hepatitis. Prospective and retrospective studies revealed that nearly half of patients wi ...

In spite of the recent progress in molecular biology of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) genome, the biological characteristics of this virus remain poorly known. This is primarily because biological assays for HCV have been limitted to the experimental inoculation of chimpanzees. It is imperat ...

A model of HCV replication has several potential important applications (Table 1). In addition to humans, the natural host for HCV, chimpanzees are the only other animals that have been shown to be permissive to HCV infection. However, the primate model for HCV infection presents several proble ...

The liver performs a wide array of functions, a few of which include the synthesis and secretion of most of the plasma proteins, including the lipoproteins, cholesterol, and bile acid metabolism, and detoxification of the blood. In vitro analysis of most liver functions has been hampered by the dif ...

Research since 1983 has demonstrated that human hepatocytes can be isolated, cultured, and used for biological investigations, including studies of gene transcription and drug metabolism (1,2). In addition, the ability to cyropreserve hepatocytes has facilitated clinical res ...

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) remains the leading cause of non-A, non-B hepatitis, and a major indicator for orthotopic liver transplantation. To date, finding a cure or even a commonly effective therapy for infection with HCV has proven to be an elusive goal. One major problem that has hampered attempts to d ...

Efficient and stable transfer of foreign DNA into cells both in vitro and in vivo has become a powerful tool in the study of the pathogeneses of various diseases, such as cancer and infectious diseases. The study of hepatitis C virus (HCV) pathogenesis has been hampered by the lack of an easily available a ...

In essence, replication-deficient (RD) adenovirus (Ad) vectors can be considered to function as an extremely efficient DNA transfection system capable of providing transgene expression in up to 100% of cells both in vitro or in vivo. As researchers continue to realize the full potential of th ...

The herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) amphcon has been developed as a novel eukaryotic expression vector, which contains an HSV-1 ori for DNA replication and a pac signal for cleaving/packaging genomes into viral capsids (1–4). As shown in Fig. 1, amplicon vector can be amplified into head-to-tail c ...

There are currently no methods for propogating hepatitis C virus (HCV) in culture useful for the analysis of viral proteins. Therefore, we have utilized Sindbis virus-based vectors to express and study HCV genes and their products.

The procedure described here was reported to detect the genomic strand of the hepatitis virus (HDV) RNA (1) in formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded liver sections (Fig. 1). The method used a 27-mer end-labeled with digoxigenin (DIG). Hybrids were detected by a specific antibody coupled to alkal ...

The cloning and sequencing of the hepatitis D virus (HDV) genome in 1986 established the peculiar features that make HDV the only genus of the Deltaviridae family (1). HDV is a defective negative-strand RNA virus that requires concurrent infection with the hepatitis B virus (HBV) to complete its r ...

Hepatitis delta virus antigen (HDV Ag) was discovered by Rizzetto and associates in 1977 following the detection of a novel nuclear antigen in the hepatocytes of some hepatitis B virus carriers (1). HDV Ag is the nucleocapsid protein of a small RNA virus known as HDV. In infected liver tissue, HDV Ag is gen ...

There is only one antigen specifically associated with the hepatitis delta virus (HDV) infection, i.e., the hepatitis delta antigen (HDAg) (1,2). HDAg is a phosphoprotein encoded by an open reading frame conserved among all HDV isolates. HDAg is a structural protein, because approx 200 subuni ...

Measurement of viral nucleic acid in serum is often a valuable adjunct to the management of viral infections (1). In hepatitis B, tests for hepatitis B virus (HBV) DNA have been used widely (Table 1), but their interpretation and significance have yet to be defined. HBV DNA assays are limited by lack of stan ...