Reply to “Can the ratio of serum HBV RNA to DNA reflect the reverse transcription efficiency of viral pgRNA?”

Abstract

We thank Li et al for their interest regarding our article reporting the profile of serum HBV RNA in patients with chronic hepatitis B infection. In our study, we used a relatively established assay that detects amplicons in the HBV X and core targets to measure serum HBV RNA, which is full-length pre-genomic RNA. We acknowledged that the assay could not detect all RNA materials that are present in the serum, e.g. spliced HBV variants, X gene RNA and smaller fragments.