FIGURE.

Genotyping and molecular sequencing* of hepatitis C virus^† specimens from two patients^§ in an acute care general hospital — Texas, 2015

Abbreviations: HCV = hepatitis C virus; bp = base pairs.

* Both patients were infected with genotype 4a and quasispecies (HCV intra-genotype variants) analysis demonstrates maximum nucleotide identity of 99.62% among intra-host HCV sequences.

^† E1-HVR1 region, 264 bp in length, only NGS454 unique sequences are shown.

^§ Solid dots represent the quasispecies from the patient with known chronic HCV infection (patient A), and open dots represent quasispecies from the patient with newly diagnosed HCV infection (patient B). Although the viral variants are not identical between the two cases, the genetic distances in nucleotide variation between the cases are well below the threshold for defining transmission linkage.