Acknowledgments This work was supported by grants from the National Basic Research Program of China (No 973 Program, No 2007CB914804, No 2007CB914802, No 2009CB521702) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No 30670959).The authors thank Dr Q LIU (University of Saskatchewan, Canada) for providing the plasmids: pFAS-WT-Luc, pFAS-ΔSRE–Luc, and SREBP-1c-571-Luc-WT.
Aim: Previously, we identified a natural mutant of hepatitis B virus X gene (HBx) with a deletion from 382 to 401 base pairs (termed HBxΔ127), which could potently enhance growth of hepatoma cells. In this study...