BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Hepatitis C virus (HCV) chronically infects around 200 million people worldwide and frequently causes liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Rapid detection of this virus results in decreasing the distance between infection and initiation the anti-viral treatment, and may prevent most of the undesirable consequences. The new detected HCV protein "Core+1" made fr...

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) assembly remains a poorly understood process. Lipid droplets (LDs) are thought to act as platforms for the assembly of viral components. The JFH1 HCV strain replicates and assembles in association with LD-associated membranes, around which viral core protein is predominantly detected. In contrast, despite its intrinsic capacity to localize to LDs when expressed individua...

Substitution of amino acids 70 and 91 in the hepatitis C virus (HCV) core region is a significant predictor of poor responses to peginterferon-plus-ribavirin therapy, while their molecular mechanisms remain unclear. Here we investigated these differences in the response to alpha interferon (IFN) by using HCV cell culture with R70Q, R70H, and L91M substitutions. IFN treatment of cells transfecte...

The hepatitis C virus (HCV) is an important human pathogen causing chronic hepatitis, liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. HCV is an enveloped virus with a positive-sense, single-stranded RNA genome encoding a single polyprotein that is processed to generate viral proteins. Several hundred molecules of the structural Core protein are thought to coat the genome in the viral particle, as...

Patients infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV) have an impaired response against HCV antigens while keeping immune competence for other antigens. We hypothesized that expression of HCV proteins in infected dendritic cells (DC) might impair their antigen-presenting function, leading to a defective anti-HCV T-cell immunity. To test this hypothesis, DC from normal donors were transduced with an ad...

abstract: genotyping of the hepatitis c virus (hcv) is important for designing therapeutic strategies and regional specific diagnostic assays. the aim of this study was to identify the hcv genotypes in hcv infected blood donors. this is the first report on hcv genotypes in blood donors in iran. in this cross-sectional study, 103 blood donors with hepatitis c were investigated for hcv genotypes....

The signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) family proteins are transcription factors critical in mediating cytokine signaling. Among them, STAT3 is often constitutively phosphorylated and activated in human cancers and in transformed cell lines and is implicated in tumorigenesis. However, cause of the persistent activation of STAT3 in human tumor cells is largely unknown. The h...

Background: Core protein of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) has an important role in HCV self-replication, pathogenesis and carcinogenesis. Objectives: To identify the effect of core proteins from different quasispecies of HCV genotype 1b expressed in a HepG2 cell line on human gene expression profiles. Materials and Methods: Core protein eukrocytic expression plasmids (pEGFP-N1) containing differe...

Background: Although regular frequent blood transfusion improves overall survival of multi-transfused patients like β-thalassemic ones, it carries a definite risk of infection with blood-borne viruses such as viral hepatitis. This study was done to determine seropositivity of hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), and Human Immunedeficiency Virus (HIV) infections among β-th...

Hepatocytes are the primary targets of the hepatitis C virus (HCV). While immunosuppressive roles of HCV core protein have been found in several studies, it remains uncertain whether core protein expressed in hepatocytes rather than in immune cells affects the CD8+ T cell response. In order to transduce genes selectively into hepatocytes, we developed a baculoviral vector system that enabled pr...