Figure 1.

The HCV 5'UTR secondary structure. The base pairing convention described by Honda et al [17] is used to depict the predicted base pairing in the HCV IRES RNA structure for genotype 1b. The structural domains are labelled I-IV. The authentic HCV start codon at HCV nt 342–344 is boxed. The wild type HCV IRES dIV RNA sequence used in this study represents HCV nt 331–354.