Figure 3.

Evidence for a lymphoid HBV reservoir. The woodchuck and woodchuck hepatitis virus (WHV), a useful animal model system for hepadnaviruses, has established lymphoid infection by WHV [111,112,113,114]. Several research groups have suggested the detection of viral nucleic acids including HBV cccDNA, RNA, and DNA as well as viral integration within lymphoid cells [54,56,115,116,117,118,119,120,121,122,123,124]. Furthermore, direct infection of lymphoid cells with clinically derived HBV has been achieved in vitro [125,126]. HBV derived from the lymphoid reservoirs has been stimulated with the use of mitogens [125,127,128]. Furthermore, lymphoid derived HBV is suggested to be implicated in the re-infection of liver grafts post-liver transplant [117]. Figure created using Biorender.com.