Figure 1.

Selection of a patient’s hepatitis B virus (HBV) sequence for HBV genotype C immunogen design. 1447 HBV genotype C whole genome sequences downloaded from hepatitis B Virus database (HBVdb), were aligned using MAFFT and used to generate a consensus sequence for HBV genotype C (phylogenetic tree of all sequences shown in (a). The pairwise distance between each sequence in the alignment and the consensus sequence was calculated. The sequence isolated from a person infected with HBV with the closest amino acid sequence to the consensus was selected (accession number: KJ173426 HBV isolate C2). The phylogenetic tree shows the relationship of the chosen sequence (KJ173426 highlighted red) with all downloaded HBV genotype C sequences in (a) and to other closely related sequences (b). Sequence accession number KP017269 is not derived from an infected person (it is a consensus sequence) and so was disregarded. Alignment of precore/core/polymerase/large-surface protein of the consensus and selected KJ173426 sequence (c) showed one amino acid difference, at positions 321 in polymerase protein (leucine (L) in HBV genotype C consensus and phenylalanine (F) in KJ173426 HBV isolate C2), highlighted by grey box with red letters.