All publicly available HCV 1b sequences were downloaded from GenBank and the Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL). These were aligned with 2b/1b hemigenomes, representing the 1b portion of the coding region separated at the Recombination Detection Program (RDP)-inferred breakpoint, using the fast option in MAFFT version 7 in AliView and edited manually. Recombinant genomes were acquired from this study or these databases
