Detection and genotyping of GBV-C/HGV variants in China

We detected GBV-C/HGV sequences in the sera from 64 out of a total of 324 s ubjects in the south of China. In agreement with findings of others, we not ed an especially high rate of infection among intravenous drug addicts and patients with chronic hepatitis C virus infection. The detection was achiev ed by nested PCR to amplify the 5' noncoding region (5'NCR) of the viral ge nome. Sequence analysis of the resulting 234 bp product revealed a total of 26 different sequences of which 25 were found to belong to the genotype G3 , which is the most prevalent genotypes among Asian isolates, and one belon ged to genotype G1, common among African isolates. The sequence divergence between the genotypes was largely clustered in a short variable region (V2) within the 5'NCR, and we showed that genotyping may be achieved equally we ll by analysis of this variable region as by the more detail analysis of th e entire 5'NCR or of the entire viral genome. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V . All rights reserved.