-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 1
Background
Hepatitis B virus (HBV), a member of the Orthohepadnavirus genus of the Hepadnaviridae family, is a major global health concern, causing both acute and chronic liver disease. With a circular, partially double-stranded DNA genome of approximately 3.2 kb, HBV replicates via reverse transcription, a unique feature among DNA viruses. It is highly infectious and transmitted through blood, sexual contact, and from mother to child during childbirth. Chronic HBV infection is a leading cause of liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), contributing to an estimated 820,000 deaths per year worldwide. The virus displays significant genetic diversity, classified into at least nine genotypes (A-I) and several subgenotypes, which exhibit distinct geographical distributions and are associated with different clinical outcomes and responses to treatment.
Efforts to control HBV have been aided by the availability of a highly effective prophylactic vaccine, which has significantly reduced the incidence of new infections in countries with high vaccine coverage. However, challenges remain, as chronic infections persist in approximately 296 million individuals globally, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Antiviral therapies, including nucleos(t)ide analogs, can suppress viral replication but rarely achieve a complete cure, necessitating lifelong treatment for many patients. Research continues to focus on understanding HBV pathogenesis, immune evasion mechanisms, and the development of novel therapeutic strategies, including immune-modulatory treatments and functional cure approaches aimed at eliminating or controlling the virus in chronically infected individuals.
HBV-GLUE is a comprehensive bioinformatics platform dedicated to HBV genome sequence analysis. A web-based instance, hosted by the University of Glasgow, allows users to perform standard analyses, while the offline version offers bioinformaticians a powerful tool for advanced analysis.
A major challenge in HBV genomics is the virus's circular genome, which complicates standard genomic analysis due to inconsistent definitions of the "start" position. This lack of uniformity complicates tasks such as sequence alignment, mutation mapping, and gene annotation, especially given HBV's overlapping genes and highly compact genome. HBV-GLUE tackles these issues by providing specialized tools for circular genomes, including standardized reference sequences and rotation commands that help establish a consistent nucleotide numbering system. This functionality supports seamless comparisons across studies and datasets, creating a unified framework that enables precise genetic analysis of HBV.