Multigene-Based Molecular Diagnostics of HCV

: J Bioengineer & Biomedical Sci

Abstract :

Hepatitis C Virus is emerging as a major global health problem. According to World Health Organization, 3% of the world?s population is infected with HCV. In India, which is the second most populated country in the world, ~12 million people are infected with HCV. Molecular diagnostics of HCV is a field where lot of research needs to be done to fill up the lacunae existing in this field. Although, many serological and molecular tests are available for molecular diagnostics of HCV, there is still scope of improvement. Current molecular diagnosis of HCV is based on 5?UTR of HCV because of its sequence conservation. This region, however, also contains genotypically variable nucleotide sequence positions, which allow discrimination of all major types and subtypes of HCV. Also, the increased sequence variability (in the form of insertion, deletion, transition and transversion) in the 5?UTR of HCV has resulted in decreased specificity of 5?UTR based molecular diagnosis. It was observed that HCV molecular diagnosis based on single gene target (5?UTR), does miss some of the known positives. Therefore, multigene approach targeting 2 structural (Core and Env) and 2 non-structural (NS3 and NS5) gene regions, along with the 5?UTR in different combinations was evaluated. It was observed that instead of 5?UTR alone, a combination of three genes target (5?UTR, Core and NS5) used simultaneously in RT-PCR seemed to be ~100% accurate for molecular diagnosis of HCV, often crucial for diagnosis of individual patients.