| ARTICLE ABSTRACT | |||||||
| DOI: 10.1099/vir.0.18642-0 | ||||||||
| Online 12 November 2002 | ||||||||
Jean-François Cantaloube, Philippe Biagini, Houssam Attoui, Pierre Gallian, Philippe de Micco and Xavier de Lamballerie
Unité des Virus Emergents, Etablissement Français du Sang Alpes-Méditerranée, EA32/92-IFR48, Université de la Méditerranée, Faculté de Médecine, 27 Bd J. Moulin, F-13005 Marseille, France
This paper describes the study of hepatitis C virus (HCV) evolution in the largest cohort of HCV-infected blood donors (BDs)/blood recipients (BRs) reported to date (25 pairs). A molecular analysis of partial sequences in the E1 (envelope) and NS5-B (polymerase) genes was performed. Phylogenetic reconstruction showed that the evolution of dominant strains was qualitatively and quantitatively different in BDs and BRs. The evolutionary rate was significantly higher in BRs, in which, in addition, most substitutions observed were antonymous. These findings corroborate the hypothesis that a large part of virus evolution – which was evaluated to be equivalent to ~20 years of chronic evolution – is acquired during the early phase of infection. These findings should be taken into account for the modelling of the long-term evolution of HCV and their possible contribution to improve our understanding of HCV natural history is discussed.
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© 2002 SGM
This article is now available in the February 2003 print issue of JGV (vol. 84, 441–446). Thereafter it will be available in electronic form on JGV Online.
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