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. 2007 Apr 5;4(2):105-9.
doi: 10.7150/ijms.4.105.

Characterization of erythrovirus B19 genomes isolated in liver tissues from patients with fulminant hepatitis and biliary atresia who underwent liver transplantation

Kenji Abe  1 , Tetsuya Kiuchi, Koichi Tanaka, Yoshihiro Edamoto, Naoto Aiba, Tetsutaro Sata
Affiliations

Characterization of erythrovirus B19 genomes isolated in liver tissues from patients with fulminant hepatitis and biliary atresia who underwent liver transplantation

Kenji Abe et al. Int J Med Sci. .

Abstract

Background: Fulminant hepatitis and biliary atresia are serious problems and their causes have not been explained well. We investigated whether or not erythrovirus B19 is a candidate etiologic agent in such liver disease patients who had undergone liver transplantation.

Methods: Liver tissues from 47 patients consisted of 28 fulminant hepatitis and 19 biliary atresia were examined to detect B19 genes by PCR and further analyzed their genomic characterization.

Results: B19 DNA was detected by nested PCR in 10 of 28 cases (35.7%) livers in the fulminant hepatitis group and 7 of 19 (36.8%) livers in the biliary atresia group, respectively (statistically not significant). Importantly, among the 8 hepatic B19 DNA-positive patients who had paired samples of liver and serum, the serum B19 genome was detectable in only one case. B19 mRNA was identified in all of 10 fulminant hepatitis cases with hepatic B19 DNA, but only 1 out of 7 (14.3%) cases in biliary atresia tested. Furthermore, we obtained ten isolates having the B19 genome with nearly full-length sequences. Interestingly, phylogenetic analysis based on the NS1 gene revealed three different clusters: two for isolates from fulminant hepatitis and the other for isolates from biliary atresia.

Conclusions: Our results presented here suggested that B19 may be an etiologic agent of fulminant hepatitis.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest: The authors have declared that no conflict of interest exists.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Phylogram generated by neighbor-joining analysis of genetic distances in the NS1 region of erythrovirus B19. The percentage of bootstrap replicates supporting these branches is shown. FH=fulminant hepatitis, BA=biliary atresia.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Alignment of amino acid sequences (upper) and nucleic acid sequences (lower) in the NS1 region of erythrovirus B19. Dot (.) indicate amino acids identical to the top sequence. B cell epitope region indicated by box.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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