Role of Humoral Immunity against Hepatitis B Virus Core Antigen in the Pathogenesis of Acute Liver Failure

To investigate the role of viral and host factors in acute liver failure, we analyzed serum and multiple liver specimens obtained at the time of liver transplantation from four well-characterized patients. We carried out an integrated clinicopathological analysis, gene and microRNA expression profiling, next-generation sequencing, antibody-displaying phage libraries, and in vitro functional analysis of HBV variants. Liver samples were obtained from 4 patients with HBV-associated acute liver failure (ALF), 10 liver donors and 7 subjects who underwent hepatic resection for liver angioma. As this is the continuation of a previous study (Title: Integrated ordination of miRNA and mRNA expression profiles; Authors: Diaz et al.) miRNA (microRNA) data are already available at the Gene Expression Omnibus (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo) under the accession number GSE62037. The present submission concerns only mRNA data.