疾病及处理

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 ...

Detection of minute amounts of hepatitis B virus (HBV) DNA in the serum using polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based assay involves extracting the viral DNA from the viral particle in the serum, removing inhibitors of PCR, performing the PCR, and detecting the PCR product. PCR is an extremely sens ...

Cell-free RNA of a different origin is known to circulate in the blood (1–3). This finding has also been reported for RNA specified by viruses with a DNA genome, such as the hepatitis B virus (HBV)(4). In the infected cell, genomic and subgenomic HBV-RNA molecules are synthesized from episomal genomes. Wi ...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) DNA is present in the blood of patients with acute or chronic HBV infection at concentrations representing up to hundreds of millions of virions per milliliter of plasma. Detection of HBV DNA was feasible, if not particularly sensitive, even before development of methods ...

Hepadnaviruses utilize an unusual replication strategy. On infection, the partially double-stranded open circular genomic DNA is transported to the hepatocyte nucleus, where host-cell enzymes convert it to a relaxed circular fully double-stranded molecule. From this replic ...

The technique of in situ hybridization was first developed to localize specific DNA sequences on chromosomes (1). This technique has subsequently been modified to detect viral nuclear acids in tissue sections. Information gathered from this type of study can help us to identify the site of vi ...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) leads to an overexpression of its surface antigen (HBsAg) in the infected hepatocytes. HBsAg is constitutively secreted as pleomorphic particles, predominantly spherical and partly filamentous. Their diameter appears in negatively stained electron mi ...