FIG. 7.

Replication fitness of non-genotype 1 chimeric replicons. NS5B was rescued from HCV-infected chimpanzee sera of genotypes 2a, 2b, 3a, 4a, and 6a and cloned into the con1 replicon; cs2a and cs2b, however, were cloned into the BK replicon. RNA was transfected into MR2 cells and evaluated for replication, as described in Materials and Methods. Replication was normalized to that of con1, setting it to a relative fitness level of 1. For genotype 2a NS5B, the consensus sequence was generated and tested, while for genotype 2b, the rescued sequence matched the prototype sequence. Only one sample per genotype is shown, but all sequences shown in Fig. 6 were tested.