PMC

Antigen reactivity of 43 HCV RNA-negative Ghanaian blood donations in two anti-HCV confirmatory assays.

RNA viral load in HCV-infected blood donors from Ghana and the United Kingdom. The horizontal bars denote median values.

Phylogenetic relationship between HCV NS5B sequences. The 21 Ghanaian sequences were aligned with the corresponding sequences from the 31 HCV reference strains shown in Fig. . The results are displayed as described in the legend for Fig. .

Alignment of E1/E2 amino acid sequences of five HCV Ghanaian variants. The sequences of ten clones were aligned for each variant, and the number of identical sequences is indicated on the left; for each variant, the major sequence was taken as reference. Residues identical to the major sequence are indicated by dashes. To facilitate the viewing, the HVR1 region is indicated; numbering of the residues starts at the NH2 terminus of E2.

Phylogenetic relationship between HCV E1/E2 sequences. The 23 Ghanaian sequences were aligned with 31 HCV reference strains from the GenBank data base. The six major lineages of HCV are indicated by the boldface numbers along the branches; reference strains are identified by their GenBank accession numbers, and subtypes of the viruses are also reported in parenthesis (classification according to Salemi and Vandamme []). The Ghanaian sequences determined in this study are indicated by boldface characters; only significant bootstrap values (≥80%) are shown.