BACKGROUND AND AIMS The prevalence and severity of liver steatosis are higher in patients infected with genotype 3 hepatitis C virus (HCV) than in patients infected with other genotypes. HCV core protein is known to affect lipid metabolism, inducing lipid droplet accumulation both in vitro and in vivo. An in vitro cellular model was used to investigate whether an HCV core protein with residues ...

BACKGROUND Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a major cause of morbidity in HIV infected individuals. Coinfection with HIV is associated with diminished HCV-specific immune responses and higher HCV RNA levels. AIMS To investigate whether long-term combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) restores HCV-specific T cell responses and improves the control of HCV replication. METHODS T cell re...

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a major cause of chronic liver disease and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). HCV is an enveloped positivestranded RNA virus, belonging to the Flaviviridae family. The HCV genome produces a polyprotein precursor which is processed by proteases and yields at least 10 proteins. HCV possesses a second open reading frame (ORF) within the core gene, encoding an intr...

background and objectives: hepatitis c virus (hcv) is a major public health problem worldwide. replication and persistence of hcv genome have been described in the liver tissue as well as b cells lymphocyte. several investigations have reported that long-term persistence of hcv in b cells may result in hodgkin and non-hodgkin lymphoma. this study was aimed to determine frequency of hcv rna in h...

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a human RNA virus encoding 10 proteins in a single open reading frame. In the +1 frame, an 'alternate reading frame' (ARF) overlaps with the core protein-encoding sequence and encodes the ARF protein (ARFP). Here, we investigated the molecular regulatory mechanisms of ARFP expression in HCV target cells. Chimeric HCV-luciferase reporter constructs derived from the inf...

Previous studies demonstrate that soluble HIV proteins impact both hepatocyte function and HCV replication in vitro. It has also been reported that HIV can productively infect hepatocytes. We therefore investigated the impact of HIV infection of hepatocytes on HCV expression. The Huh7.5JFH1 cell line that constitutively expresses infectious HCV was infected with the lab-adapted strains HIVNL4-3...

Screening and evaluating anti- hepatitis C virus (HCV) drugs in vivo is difficult worldwide, mainly because of the lack of suitable small animal models. We investigate whether zebrafish could be a model organism for HCV replication. To achieve NS5B-dependent replication an HCV sub-replicon was designed and created with two vectors, one with HCV ns5b and fluorescent rfp genes, and the other cont...

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is an important human pathogen infecting hepatocytes. With the advent of infectious cell culture systems, the HCV particle assembly and release processes are finally being uncovered. The HCV core and NS5A proteins co-localize on cytoplasmic lipid droplets (cLDs) or on the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) at different stages of particle assembly. Current knowledge on assembly a...

Our previous study indicated that the core protein of hepatitis C virus (HCV) can associate with tumor necrosis factor receptor (TNFR)-related lymphotoxin-b receptor (LT-bR) and that this protein-protein interaction plays a modulatory effect on the cytolytic activity of recombinant form LT-bR ligand (LT-a1b2) but not tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-a) in certain cell types. Since both TNF-a/TN...

Our previous study indicated that the core protein of hepatitis C virus (HCV) can associate with tumor necrosis factor receptor (TNFR)-related lymphotoxin-beta receptor (LT-betaR) and that this protein-protein interaction plays a modulatory effect on the cytolytic activity of recombinant form LT-betaR ligand (LT-alpha1beta2) but not tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha) in certain cell types....