Immunofluorescent staining for the detection of the hepatitis B core antigen in frozen liver sections of human liver chimeric mice

Abstract

The hepatitis B virus (HBV) is the causative agent for chronic hepatitis B infection, which affects an estimate of 240 million people worldwide and puts them at risk of developing terminal liver disease. The life cycle of the virus and its interactions with the host immune system are still incompletely understood, and currently available treatment options rarely achieve a cure. Therefore, basic research and new drug development are needed. One parameter for measuring the intrahepatic activity of the virus is monitoring the production of the HBV core antigen (HBcAg), which not only serves as the main structural protein of its nucleocapsid but is also recruited to the covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA), the nuclear HBV genome responsible for infection persistence. Here, we report a sensitive immunofluorescence staining method to detect HBcAg in cryopreserved liver sections. The method combines conventional immunofluorescence staining procedures with the Tyramide Signal Amplification (TSA) system.