Highly diverse TTV population in infants and their mothers

Infants born to serum HCV-positive 12 mothers were enrolled in the study. Nucleotide sequences amplified by primers deduced from a noncoding region were compared between mothers and their infants. The rates for detection of serum TTV in 12 mothers and their infants were 10/12 (83%) and 9/12 (75%), respectively. Serum TTV DNA was not detected in any infant at 1 month of age, but was detected for the first time between 1.5 and 8 months after birth. Positivity persisted thereafter throughout the follow-up period. In seven randomly selected mother-infant pairs, intrahost TTV heterogeneity was lower in infants than in mothers. Furthermore, one of seven mother-infant pairs showed a high degree of similarity (98.7–100%) in all clones, while in four infants, all nucleotide sequences differed by >10% from those of their mothers. However, the degree of homology in the two mother-infant pairs was 89–98.7% in family 2 and 88.1–99.4% in family 5. In the present study, with only one exception, it was shown that TTV from infants is not identical to TTV from mothers. The mechanism is discussed briefly in this paper.