DOI: 10.5061/dryad.qz612jmj1
title: Assessment of hepatitis B viral lymphotrophism using deep curation

description: Background: The replicative forms of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) is found
 in several types of white blood cells within the host defense system. To
 determine the dimensionality of the extrahepatic manifestation of HBV in
 host white blood cells, it is important to understand the complete biology
 of its pathogenesis and lymphotropic nature. Methods: Deep curation of the
 literature from the PubMed database pertaining to the HBV manifestation in
 the human host white blood cells was conducted and then manually filtered
 to determine the behavioral trend of the virus within the human white
 blood cells. Results: The curation of 198 research articles identified 28
 genes, 92 proteins, and 20 Peripheral Blood Mononuclear cells involved in
 HBV pathogenesis, while 20 immune cells were found to be permissive for
 the viral penetration and replication. The presence of the replicative
 forms of HBV in the host immune cells led to the further elucidation of 28
 genes and 92 proteins that interact with one or more viral genes and
 proteins. Conclusions: A multi-dimensional analysis using deep curation
 identified a possible lymphotropic character of HBV. Moreover, there are
 certain pathways that could aid in the propagation of viral infection by
 using immune cells to its advantage. Thus, instead of eliminating HBV, the
 immune system may contribute to the population expansion of the virus.
description: The data pertaining to the
 direct or indirect interaction evidence between the HBV proteins and the
 host PBMCs proteins and genes were derived from scientific publications.
 These interaction data were derived from publications available in various
 repositories such as NCBI,
 PubMed and Google Scholar
 using keyword
 searches. The initial
 keywords ‘Hepatitis B’ and ‘Human’ were used, which generated
 88,113 research articles on epidemiology,
 clinical-trials, vaccinations, therapeutics that were beyond the scope of
 the hypothesis. Subsequently, the keywords ‘Hepatitis B’ and
 ‘lymphotropism’ were used and retrieved 360 research articles. However, the literature
 was vague, and the information deviated from the key area of research.
 Similar issues were observed with the keywords ‘Hepatitis B’ and
 ‘Extrahepatic Manifestation’, which generated 29 hits but limited concrete
 information pertaining to our hypothesis. Eventually, an exhaustive list of keywords was
 prepared that contained all the known HBV genes and proteins, all
 molecules of host PBMCs such as dendritic cells, HLA, and synonyms for
 PBMCs such as white blood cells, lymphocytes, and
 leukocytes. The list included relational keywords to identify
 a correlation between the viral and host proteins during the text mining,
 including inhibit, replicate, upregulate, downregulate, significant, and
 higher. The keywords were extracted by searching through the research
 articles that pertained to HBV and human host protein in PubMed published
 in the past ten years. The keywords were matched across all the abstracts
 downloaded from PubMed using keywords ‘HBV’ and ‘Human’ using Python
 scripts.