The treatment schedule (combination of compounds, doses, and duration) and the virological follow-up for management of antiviral treatment in patients chronically infected by HCV is now well standardized, but to ensure good monitoring of the treated patients, physicians need rapid, ...

HCV infection is usually diagnosed by means of an enzyme immune assay for the detection of antibody against HCV. The window period between infection and seroconversion remains a dramatic problem in the transfusional and diagnostic setting. In this chapter, we report (i) procedures for assa ...

Detection and localization of HCV in liver tissue are vital for diagnostic purposes and clinical management of HCV-infected patients, as well as for the elucidation of viropathological mechanisms. The fragility of HCV RNA and the low levels of viral expression in infected tissues are a cons ...

International standardization and coordination of the nomenclature of variants of hepatitis C virus (HCV) is increasingly needed as more is discovered about the scale of HCV-related liver disease and important biological and antigenic differences that exist between variants. C ...

HCV infection provides a classic example of the phenomenon of quasispecies. Because several lines of investigation support the contribution of quasispecies to HCV’s capacity to maintain a persistent infection, adequate characterization of the quasispecies is important. The hy ...

The HCV genome is highly heterogeneous; more and more genotypes, each with several distinct subtypes, are being identified around the world. Knowledge of genotype is important for planning of treatment regimes, whereas subtype identification is useful in epidemiological studies a ...

The p7 membrane polypeptide from HCV is essential for virus infection. It exhibits ion-channel activity reported to be specifically blocked by various compounds. These properties make p7 an attractive candidate target for antiviral intervention to combat viral hepatitis C infect ...

The hepatitis C virus (HCV) has infected some 170 million people worldwide, and is expected to pose a significant medical problem for the foreseeable future. No vaccine is presently available, and the current antiviral therapies (pegylated interferon-α and ribavirin) are characteriz ...

Detailed analysis of hepatitis C virus (HCV) has been hampered by the lack of an appropriate viral culture system and small animal models of infection. My group and others have recently reported the production of infectious virus after full-length HCV RNA transfection into Huh-7 cells. This sy ...

HCV is a small RNA virus belonging to the genus Hepacivirus within the virus family Flaviviridae. Infection with HCV often leads to chronic liver diseases including chronic hepatitis, liver cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma. Current therapy, based on the use of interferon-α (IFN ...

Recently described systems for efficiently growing HCV in cell culture provide powerful new tools with which to dissect the life cycle of this important human pathogen. This chapter describes methods for measuring the infectivity of HCV produced in cell culture or recovered from animals ...

One hallmark of HCV is its pronounced genetic plasticity, caused by error-prone RNA replication, which probably contributes to its remarkable ability to establish chronic infections. On the basis of phylogenetic analyses, HCV variants are classified into six genotypes (GTs), each co ...

Studies of HCV pathogenesis and antiviral research have been hampered by the lack of adequate cell-culture and small-animal models. The culturing of human primary hepatocytes would greatly facilitate the model development in HCV research. The availability of robust infectious vir ...

A major breakthrough in the field of HCV research was the development of a system that supports the production of infectious virus particles. The key to this achievement was the molecular cloning of a genotype 2a genome, designated JFH1, which replicates to exceptionally high levels and at the sa ...

Estimates of hepatitis C virus infection include 170 million people worldwide, who face increased risk of development of cirrhosis, liver failure, and hepatocellular carcinoma. Standard of care therapy with pegylated interferon and ribavirin is effective in just half of patients, is ...

The magnitude and breadth of T-cell responses against HCV are associated with the outcome of HCV infection. Parameters of HCV-specific T-cell responses that are frequently assessed in clinical immunological studies include proliferation of T cells in response to HCV antigens, frequ ...

Flow cytometry has become an essential research tool because of the increase in the number of its {applications.} The development of an increasing number of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and fluorochromes, and of instruments capable of multicolor detection, allows the acquisition of a l ...

In the last decade, viral kinetic modeling has played an important role in the analysis of HCV RNA decay after the initiation of antiviral therapy. Models have provided a means of evaluating the antiviral effectiveness of therapy and of estimating parameters, such as the rate of virion clearance ...

Infectious HCV pseudoparticles (HCVpp) can be assembled by display of unmodified and functional HCV glycoproteins on retroviral and lentiviral core particles. HCVpp have been shown to mimic the early infection steps of parental HCV. The presence of a marker gene packaged within these HCV ...

The following describes noncommercial methods for the purification of genomic and plasmid DNA from S. epidermidis. These include both large-scale, high molecular weight and quick, small-scale chromosomal DNA extractions, and also a standard alkaline lysis method of plasmid prepa ...