Yushen Du, Xiumei Chi, Chong Wang, Jing Jiang, Fei Kong, Hongqing Yan, Xiaomei Wang, Jie Li, Nicholas C Wu, Lei Dai, Tian-Hao Zhang, Sara Shu, Jian Zhou, Janice M Yoshizawa, Xinmin Li, Debika Bhattacharya, Ting-Ting Wu, Junqi Niu, Ren Sun
Despite full immunoprophylaxis, mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of Hepatitis B Virus still occurs in approximately 2-5% of HBsAg positive mothers. Little is known about the bottleneck of HBV transmission and the evolution of viral quasispecies in the context of MTCT. Here we adopted a newly developed tag linkage deep sequencing method and analyzed the quasispecies of four MTCT pairs that broke through immunoprophylaxis. By assigning unique tags to individual viral sequences, we accurately reconstructed HBV haplotypes in a region of 836 bp, which contains the major immune epitopes and drug resistance mutations...
August 31, 2017: Scientific Reports