Centre for Multidisciplinary Research, Institute of Nuclear Sciences VINCA, Belgrade, Serbia.
Protein J. 2012 Feb;31(2):129-36. doi: 10.1007/s10930-011-9381-6.
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a major and rising global health problem, affecting about 170 million people worldwide. The current standard of care treatment with interferon alpha and ribavirin in patients with the genotype 1 infection, the most frequent genotype in the USA and Western Europe, leads to a successful outcome in only about 50% of individuals. Accurate prediction of hepatitis C treatment response is of great benefit to patients and clinicians. The informational spectrum method, a virtual spectroscopy method for structure/function analysis of nucleotide and protein sequences, is applied here for the identification of the conserved information of the HCV proteins that correlate with the combination therapy outcome. Among the HCV proteins that we have analyzed the informational property of the p7 of HCV genotype 1b was best related to the therapy outcome. On the basis of these results, a simple bioinformatics criterion that could be useful in assessment of the response of HCV-infected patients to the combination therapy has been proposed.
丙型肝炎病毒（HCV）感染是一个主要的、不断上升的全球健康问题，影响着全球约 1.7 亿人。目前，美国和西欧最常见的基因型 1 感染患者采用干扰素α和利巴韦林进行标准治疗，只有约 50%的患者获得成功。准确预测丙型肝炎治疗反应对患者和临床医生都有很大的好处。信息谱方法是一种核苷酸和蛋白质序列结构/功能分析的虚拟光谱方法，本文应用该方法来识别与联合治疗结果相关的 HCV 蛋白的保守信息。在我们分析的 HCV 蛋白中，HCV 基因型 1b 的 p7 蛋白的信息特性与治疗结果相关性最好。基于这些结果，我们提出了一个简单的生物信息学标准，可用于评估 HCV 感染患者对联合治疗的反应。
