Related Experiment Videos
Hepatitis C virus whole genome position weight matrix and robust primer design
Ping Qiu1, Xiao-Yan Cai, Luquan Wang
1Bioinformatics Group and Discovery Technology Department, Schering-Plough Research Institute, 2015 Galloping Hill Road, Kenilworth, New Jersey 07033, USA. ping.qiu@spcorp.com
Background:
The high degree of sequence heterogeneity found in Hepatitis C virus (HCV) isolates, makes robust nucleic acid-based assays difficult to generate. Polymerase chain reaction based techniques, require efficient and specific sequence recognition. Generation of robust primers capable of recognizing a wide range of isolates is a difficult task.
Results:
A position weight matrix (PWM) and a consensus sequence were built for each region of HCV and subsequently assembled into a whole genome consensus sequence and PWM. For each of the 10 regions, the number of occurrences of each base at a given position was compiled. These counts were converted to frequencies that were used to calculate log odds scores. Using over 100 complete and 14,000 partial HCV genomes from GenBank, a consensus HCV genome sequence was generated along with a PWM reflecting heterogeneity at each position. The PWM was used to identify the most conserved regions for primer design.
Conclusions:
This approach allows rapid identification of conserved regions for robust primer design and is broadly applicable to sets of genomes with all levels of genetic heterogeneity.