A comparative study on the characterization of Hepatitis B Virus quasispecies by clone based sequencing and third generation sequencing

HBV has a high mutation rate due to the extremely high replication rate and the proofreading deficiency during reverse transcription. The generated variants with genetic heterogeneity are described as viral quasispecies (QS). Clone-based sequencing (CBS) is thought to be the “gold standard” for assessing QS complexity and diversity of Hepatitis B Virus (HBV), but an important issue about CBS is cost-effectiveness and laborious. In this study, we investigated the utility of the third-generation sequencing (TGS) DNA sequencing to characterize genetic heterogeneity of HBV QS and assessed the possible contribution of TGS technology in HBV QS studies. Parallel experiments including 3 control samples and 10 patients samples were performed by using CBS and TGS to analyze HBV whole genome QS.