IN-VITRO CULTURE SYSTEMS FOR HEPATITIS-B AND DELTA VIRUSES

The development of tissue culture technology has led to invaluable inf ormation in many fields of modern virology. Until recently, the lack o f an in vitro culture system for the hepatitis B virus (HBV) was a con siderable impediment to the study of its life cycle at the cellular an d molecular levels. However, it did not prevent its isolation and mole cular cloning. Such has been the case also for the hepatitis delta vir us (HDV), the genome of which was cloned and sequenced before its repl ication could be observed in cultured cells. In recent years, tissue c ulture systems for HBV and HDV have been developed progressively by th e identification of permissive, established cell lines for production of virions and susceptible primary hepatocyte cultures for infection a ssays. I will briefly review here the recent experiments that have con tributed to replicate HBV and HDV in cell culture systems.