Fig. 1.

Analyses before and after polyA⁺ purification procedure. Detection of hepatitis C virus (HCV) minus strand RNA (a), which shows serial dilutions of synthetic transcript by using sense primer in the RT reaction; (b) demonstration of HCV plus strand RNA as the result of non-specific priming; (c) anti-sense primer detects HCV minus strand RNA as mispriming effect. (d, e) Specific detection of HCV minus strand RNA from different mixtures of HCV plus and minus strand RNA added to 300 ng cellular RNA is depicted. Sense (d) and anti-sense (e) primers were used to detect minus and plus RNA strands in reverse transcription (RT) reaction. Arabic numbers in each lane represent copies HCV RNA (log) added to RT reaction. Roman numerals represent different ratio of positive/negative strands: I, 10⁸/10⁷; II, 10⁷/10⁶; III, 10⁶/10⁵; IV, 10⁵/10⁴; V, 10⁴/10³. M: (174 RF DNA/HaeIII. The arrows indicate 160 base pairs amplified product.