A global survey of alternative splicing of HBV transcriptome using Long-read sequencing

RNA-seq is deficient in determining transcript isoforms for the short length of reads and thus is not able to identify multispliced RNAs, as well as alternative transcription start site and transcription end site, especially for the complex genome like HBV with highly overlapped transcripts and open reading frames . These challenges can be overcome by the Long-read sequencing technology such as Iso-Seq since it is able to provide full contig information of transcripts . Therefore, we aimed to explore the global transcriptome of HBV through Iso-Seq to provide molecular biology evidence for the expression of HpZ/P' and HBxZ at the transcription level.