Hepatitis C virus (HCV) has been difficult to study since its discovery in 1989; its unculturable status left researchers with a narrow view of the viral life cycle. But the discovery a few years ago of a highly infectious HCV strain (JFH-1) by Takaji Wakita's lab, then at Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Neuroscience, raised the possibility of developing a robust cell culture system. JFH-1 was a huge find, says Frank Chisari, from Scripps Research Institute, and Wakita gladly shared it.
The race to develop an efficient cell culture system with JFH-1 was a short one, and in the Hot Papers featured here, several labs showed that JFH-1 could produce high levels of infectious particles in vitro. Chisari's lab demonstrated that JFH-1 could be cultured in human hepatoma Huh-7-dervied cell lines.1 In a different approach, Charles Rice's group at Rockefeller University cultured chimeras of JFH-1 to high levels, showing that the ...
