Cloning and Molecular Analysis of HCVP7 Complete Coding Sequence

Abstract

The hepatitis C virus (HCV) p7 protein is known essential for virus infection and replication. It exhibits ion-channel activity reported to be specifically blocked by various compounds, making it an attractive drug target. However, at present only little is known about the underlying molecular mechanisms of HCV p7. To predict and more understanding the molecular pattern of HCV p7 we cloned the p7 gene of HCV isolated in Central of Java Indonesia. The sequence results were then aligned with all of HCV 1a p7 complete coding sequences reported in GenBank. In total, 591 sequences were retrieved and aligned by ClustalW. We revealed the nucleotide and amino acid sequence consensus of HCV p7 gene. Overall, only aa 5, 12, 30, 34, 42, 48, 52, 58, and 63 were not have any variation. Amino acid variations may have relevant changes of physicochemical properties so that influence the replication efficiency, therefore, the amino acid variations found in the present report need further study.