Molecular phylogenetic analysis of Iranian HDV complete genome

• Published in: Virus genes Vol. 30; no. 3; pp. 383 - 393
• Main Authors: Behzadian, Farida, Sabahi, Farzaneh, Karimi, Mohsen, Sadeghizadeh, Majid, Maghsoudi, Nader, Forooshani, Ramin Sarrami, Shahinsaz, Leila
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Springer Nature B.V 01-05-2005
• Subjects: Adult; Amino Acid Sequence; Antigens, Viral - genetics; Base Sequence; Genetic Variation; Genome, Viral; Hepatitis D - virology; Hepatitis Delta Virus - genetics; Hepatitis Delta Virus - isolation & purification; Humans; Iran; Male; Molecular Sequence Data; Phylogeny; RNA, Viral - genetics; Sequence Alignment; Sequence Homology; Iran
• ISSN: 0920-8569; 1572-994X
• DOI: 10.1007/s11262-004-6782-z

Hepatitis D (delta) virus (HDV) is a subviral pathogen agent and a satellite of Hepatitis B virus. Three distinct genotypes are described for HDV; genotype I is distributed worldwide but other genotypes appear to be more restricted geographically. In the present study, the entire nucleotide sequence of an HDV isolate from an Iranian patient (IR-1) was obtained using twelve pairs of primers to amplify six overlapping fragments covering the whole HDV genome by RT-nested PCR. Phylogenetic and pairwise alignments were done on this new isolate to determine IR-1 position among other isolates. Our results indicate that IR-1 contains 1676 nucleotides encoding 214 a.a. of the hepatitis delta antigen (HDAg). This new isolate belongs to genotype I with most sequence similarity to an Italian HDV isolate (92.6%). At amino acid level, predicted HDAg sequence of IR-1 revealed the most homology with those of Italian and Lebanese isolates. Data analysis confirmed genetic variability and heterogeneity of the HDV species isolated from different geographical areas.