In vitro adaptation and characterization of attenuated hypervariable region 1 swap chimeras of hepatitis C virus
Fig 5
E1/E2 substitutions identified in HVR1-swapped H77 recombinants increase sensitivity of H77 to AR3A and AR4A. Neutralization by the bNAbs AR3A (A and C) and AR4A (B and D) of the indicated HCV recombinants. The viruses were incubated in four technical replicates with a 5-fold dilution series of the bNAbs, starting at 50 μg/ml, along with eight technical replicates of virus only. 48 hours post-infection the cells were immunostained for HCV antigen, and the number of FFUs/well was counted and normalized to the mean count of wells with virus only. Each dot represents the mean IC50 value of the indicated recombinants. Error bars represent the 95% confidence intervals (CI95). The colored broken line represents the IC50 value of unmodified H77. The data was analyzed using three-parameter dose-response with the top value set to 100 and lower value set to 0, to calculate IC50 and CI95 using GraphPad Prism v8.0.0.