After spread of infection in culture and passage to naïve cells, sequencing of the ORF from recovered viruses confirmed the deletion for all recombinants and identified changes for the H77C(1a), TN(1a), S52(3a), SA13(5a) and QC69(7a) deletion mutants, primarily in the NS5A region downstream of the deletion and in p7, NS2 and NS3 (Table 1). The gene discussed is LZTR1; the disease is infection.