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Journal of Virology, October 2009, p. 10538-10547, Vol. 83, No. 20
0022-538X/09/$08.00+0 doi:10.1128/JVI.00462-09
Copyright © 2009, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
A Genetic Variant of Hepatitis B Virus Divergent from Known Human and Ape Genotypes Isolated from a Japanese Patient and Provisionally Assigned to New Genotype J
,
Kanako Tatematsu,1
Yasuhito Tanaka,1*
Fuat Kurbanov,1
Fuminaka Sugauchi,2
Shuhei Mano,3
Tatsuji Maeshiro,4
Tomokuni Nakayoshi,5
Moriaki Wakuta,6
Yuzo Miyakawa,7 and
Masashi Mizokami1,8
Department of Clinical Molecular Informative Medicine,1 Department of Gastroenterology and Metabolism, Nagoya City University Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Nagoya, Japan,2 Nagoya City University Graduate School of Natural Sciences, Nagoya, Japan,3 Control and Prevention of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine and Therapeutics, Faculty of Medicine, University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa, Japan,4 Heart Life Hospital, Okinawa, Japan,5 Wakusan Clinic. Okinawa, Japan,6 Miyakawa Memorial Research Foundation, Tokyo, Japan,7 Research Center for Hepatitis and Immunology, International Medical Center of Japan Kohnodai Hospital, Chiba, Japan8
Received 5 March 2009/ Accepted 24 July 2009
Hepatitis B virus (HBV) of a novel genotype (J) was recovered from an 88-year-old Japanese patient with hepatocellular carcinoma who had a history of residing in Borneo during the World War II. It was divergent from eight human (A to H) and four ape (chimpanzee, gorilla, gibbon, and orangutan) HBV genotypes, as well as from a recently proposed ninth human genotype I, by 9.9 to 16.5% of the entire genomic sequence and did not have evidence of recombination with any of the nine human genotypes and four nonhuman genotypes. Based on a comparison of the entire nucleotide sequence against 1,440 HBV isolates reported, HBV/J was nearest to the gibbon and orangutan genotypes (mean divergences of 10.9 and 10.7%, respectively). Based on a comparison of four open reading frames, HBV/J was closer to gibbon/orangutan genotypes than to human genotypes in the P and large S genes and closest to Australian aboriginal strains (HBV/C4) and orangutan-derived strains in the S gene, whereas it was closer to human than ape genotypes in the C gene. HBV/J shared a deletion of 33 nucleotides at the start of preS1 region with C4 and gibbon genotypes, had an S-gene sequence similar to that of C4, and expressed the ayw subtype. Efficient infection, replication, and antigen expression by HBV/J were experimentally established in two chimeric mice with the liver repopulated for human hepatocytes. The HBV DNA sequence recovered from infected mice was identical to that in the inoculum. Since HBV/J is positioned phylogenetically in between human and ape genotypes, it may help to trace the origin of HBV and merits further epidemiological surveys.
* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of Clinical Molecular Informative Medicine, Nagoya, City University Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Kawasumi, Mizuho, Nagoya 467-8601, Japan. Phone: (81) 52-853-8292. Fax: (81) 52-842-0021. E-mail: ytanaka{at}med.nagoya-cu.ac.jp
Published ahead of print on 29 July 2009.
Supplemental material for this article may be found at http://jvi.asm.org/.
Journal of Virology, October 2009, p. 10538-10547, Vol. 83, No. 20
0022-538X/09/$08.00+0 doi:10.1128/JVI.00462-09
Copyright © 2009, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
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