Infection of Human Hepatocyte-chimeric Mice with HBV and in vivo Treatment with εRNA

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) can cause both acute and chronic disease in human liver with potentially high risk of cirrhosis and liver cancer. The host range of non-human primates susceptible to this virus is limited. Therefore, experimental studies with human hepatocyte-chimeric mice provide an invaluable source of information regarding the biology and pathogenesis of HBV. This section describes the protocol for infection of the human hepatocyte-chimeric mice with HBV. In addition, it has recently been shown that HBV replication can be suppressed by exogenous expression of viral epsilon RNA (εRNA; Sato et al., 2015), which serves as an encapsidation signal (Bartenschlager et al., 1992). Based upon this finding, we also describe the protocol for the liposome-mediated delivery of a plasmid encoding εRNA to liver in these chimeric mice.