HBcAg amino acid motifs in B and T-cell epitopes of Asia and Papua-Pacific HBV/C isolates.

<p>For the sake of clarity, this figure was not drawn to scale. Among 15 amino acid positions examined within HBcAg immune epitopes of 143 isolates, we identified I/V at position c59 as the essential variation that classified HBV/C subgenotypes into two major clusters, the Asian and the Papua-Pacific (p-value <0.001; data not shown). HBV/C4 and C14 showed similar variation in most amino acids examined, with C4 and C14 having cI59 and cV59, respectively.