A Comprehensive Overview of Hepatitis Virus Genotyping Methods

The identification and differentiation of the various genotypes of hepatitis viruses are of great importance and can contribute to both clinical procedures and scientific research. There is a wide range of typing methods, which can be mainly divided into phenotypic and genotypic methods. Here, we focused on the available genotyping methods for hepatitis virus typing and tried to review and categorize them. This study aimed to study various hepatitis virus genotyping methods. In this study, to obtain a comprehensive overview of hepatitis virus genotyping methods, a perfect search was performed using related keywords in major journals and databases. Information was extracted from articles, analyzed, categorized, and compared. In analyzing the various articles, genotyping methods were divided into three different categories: Sequencing methods, hybridization methods, and methods based on DNA binding patterns. Sequencing-based methods were cited as the gold standard and the accuracy of other methods was compared to them. Hybridization-based methods, which were also used in commercial kits, include several methods. DNA binding pattern-based methods were mainly based on PCR with genotype-specific primers or RFLP. Although molecular methods allow accurate, sensitive, and reproducible genotyping, there is still much room to be exploited using emerging methods.