. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2008 Oct 28.

Published in final edited form as: J Antimicrob Chemother. 2008 Apr 25;62(1):1–4. doi: 10.1093/jac/dkn175

Table 1.

Main distinctive viral dynamic features of HIV, HBV and HCV.

	HIV	HBV	HCV

Virus
• Daily production of virions per day	10¹⁰	10¹²-10¹³	10¹²
• Half-life of free virions (hours)	1	3-24	2-3
• Half-life of intracellular virions	Days (dependent of infected cells t_1/2)	Months (dependent of infected cells t_1/2)	Hours (non-dependent of infected cells t_1/2)
• Mutation rate	Very high	High	Very high
• Constraints due to ORFs in targeted viral enzymes	Moderate	High	None
• Immune mediated escape mutants	Frequent	Unfrequent	Frequent

Target cells
• Half-life of infected cells	Days	Months	Weeks
• Size of susceptible cells compartment	Large	Small	Probably large
• Intracellular viral reservoir	Yes	Yes	No
	(integrated cDNA)	(cccDNA)

ORFs, overlapping reading frames; cDNA, complementary DNA; cccDNA, covalently closed circular DNA