Phylogenetic analysis of hepatitis GB virus type C hepatitis G virus in Spanish patients with chronic hepatitis B or C virus infection

The nucleotide sequence of hepatitis GB virus type C (HGBV-C)/hepatitis G v irus (HGV) NS3/helicase and 5'-untranslated regions from 23 Spanish patient s were analyzed to assign the HGV isolates one of the proposed HGBV-C/HGV g enotypes. The analysis of the evolutionary distance frequency showed that t he distances among all sequences in NS3/helicase region were distributed ar ound a single peak of 0.20, suggesting that all included sequences belonged to the same HGBV-C/HGV genotype. By contrast, in the 5'-untranslated regio n, all the distances corresponding to our sequences and those of the HGBV-C /HGV types 2 and 3 were distributed around a major peak of 0.03. The remain ing distances corresponding to the HGBV-C/HGV type 1 sequences were distrib uted around a minor peak of 0.11. The phylogenetic tree and pairwise compar ison of evolutionary distances among the 5'-untranslated region of the infe cted patients and each HGBV-C/HGV genotype demonstrated that our HGBV-C/HGV isolates belonged to subtype 2a (17/23; 78%) and 2b (5/23; 22%). No relati on was found between HGBV-C/HGV subtype and hepatitis B or C virus infectio n.