A plasmid containing the cDNA of an HCV consensus clone isolated from a Japanese patient with fulminant hepatitis (JFH-1) (GenBank accession number AB047639) [91] cloned behind a T7 promoter (pJFH-1; a generous gift from Dr. Takaji Wakita, National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Tokyo, Japan) was used to generate genomic HCV RNA and infectious HCV stocks as previously described in [61] .