Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) amino acid alignments and genotype-specific consensus sequences

Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) is the prototype human hepadnavirus. Unified reference sequences are important for informing phylogenetic analysis, studying variability within and between hosts, identifying sites of polymorphism/insertions/deletions and providing standardised sequence numbering. A variety of numbering systems have been employed, causing inconsistencies between different reports. This dataset provides a reference sequence for HBV (based on sequence data previously published by another group), along with aligned amino acid consensus sequences for genotypes A-F based on all available sequences on the HBV database, https://hbvdb.ibcp.fr (accessed October 2016). This resource has informed a parallel project to collate a systematic database of HLA Class I epitopes within HBV, ‘hepitopes’, (available on-line at http://www.expmedndm.ox.ac.uk/hepitopes), for which we required a unified approach to HBV sequence numbering.