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Objective: To investigate the variants and quasispecies of reverse transcriptase region in polymerase gene of hepatitis B virus (HBV) during lamivudine treatment and their relationship with genotypes and viral loads., Methods: HBV DNA of 117 chronic hepatitis B patients treated with lamivudine were amplified by using PCR. The PCR products including the YMDD motif were sequenced by DNA sequencer, of which, HBV DNA viral loads of 99 patients were determined by real-time PCR and 64 samples were sequenced by Pyrosequencing., Results: In HBV YMDD variant group and no variant group, the HBV genotypes were 79.6% and 86.7% of type C, 18.5% and 12.7% of type B, 1.9% of A/B recombinant type and 2.6% of type D, respectively. The viral loads (log 10) were 6.5699 and 6.6165, respectively. There was no significant difference in HBV genotypes and viral loads between these two groups. The rtL180M variant was found in association with the rtM204I/V variant, HBV variants and wild-type in YMDD motif all existed together in these two groups., Conclusions: HBV variants (quasispecies) in YMDD motif could be quantified by pyrosequencing, which would be a feasible measure during nucleoside or nucleotide analogue therapy against chronic HBV infection.

Objective: To investigate the associations between polymorphisms of apolipoprotein B mRNA editing enzyme catalytic polypeptide-like 3G (APOBEC3G) and different outcomes of HBV infection in the Chinese Han population., Methods: Six hundred thirty-five chronic hepatitis B patients were divided into 3 groups: 202, 217 and 216 patients were HBV cleared, chronic hepatitis B, and with liver cirrhosis, respectively. Five tagSNPs (rs8177832, rs17000736, rs17496046, rs9622924 and rs2899313) were genotyped by pyrosequencing. HBV viral loads were determined by real-time PCR method. Chi square was used for statistics., Results: The majority of rs8177832 allele was A/A and the frequencies of rs8177832 allele among these groups were not significantly different (P more than 0.05). HBV viral loads were higher in chronic hepatitis B patients with G allele than in chronic hepatitis B patients with A allele (P less than 0.05). The rs17000736 and rs9622924 alleles were found only in G/G and C/C genotypes. There were also no significant differences in the other four SNPs alleles (rs17000736, rs17496046, rs9622924 and rs2899313) in these groups (P more than 0.05)., Conclusions: rs8177832, rs17000736, rs17496046, rs17000736 and rs2899313 of the APOBEC3G gene might not be associated with HBV persistent infection in patients in this study. However, the rs8177832 polymorphism may be involved in inhibiting HBV replication.