LAUSR

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.