Figure 1
Human APOBEC1 can efficiently hyperedit HBV minus strand DNA. A) Western blotting of V5 tagged hA1, hA2 and hA3G cDNA constructs. Molecular weight markers (kDa) are given to the left. B) Reduction of HBV DNA production following cotransfection of QT6 cells with HBV ± hA1 ± hA3G. C) PCR and 3DPCR of HBV X region DNA from transfections. C-, no DNA control; C+, HBV alone; pv, plasmid vector control; hA1, V5-tagged human APOBEC1 expression plasmid; hA2, V5 tagged human APOBEC2; hA3G, V5-tagged human APOBEC3G as positive control. M, molecular weight markers. The sizes of the PCR and 3DPCR fragments are 314 and 213 bps. D) Frequency distribution of G->A hypermutants in terms of mutations per clone. E) Mutation matrices of 24 hA1 and hA3G hyperedited HBV sequences. The size of the locus is 167 bp. F) Dinucleotide analysis of hA1 and hA3G edited HBV genomes. A χ2 analysis showed that frequencies for hA1 and hA3G deviated significantly from the expected values as indicated by asterisks (p < 0.001).