Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was employed to determine the gene polymorphism of IFITM3, and analyzed with the GraphPad Prism v 5.The patients with HCC had a significantly higher proportion of IFITM3rs12252-CC as compared with the patients with chronic HBV infection or liver cirrhosis.
The depth of the study allowed us to map the induction of antiviral proteins to multiple points of the viral life cycle, as well as facilitating the identification of antiviral proteins not previously known to be elicited upon HBV infection (<i>e.g.</i> IFITM3, XRN2, and NT5C3A).