Studies from Erasmus Medical Center, Department of Virology further understanding of hepatitis C virus

Data detailed in 'Characterization of hepatitis C virus deletion mutants circulating in chronically infected patients' have been presented. "Hepatitis C virus (HCV) has a linear positive-stranded RNA genome of approximately 9,600 nucleotides in length and displays a high level of sequence diversity caused by high mutation rates and recombination. However, when we performed long distance reverse transcription-PCRs on HCV RNA isolated from serum of chronic HCV patients, not only full-length HCV genomes but also HCV RNAs which varied in size from 7,600 to 8,346 nucleotides and contained large in-frame deletions between E1 and NS2 were amplified," scientists in Rotterdam, Netherlands...

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