hepatitis c virus is a single-stranded rna virus in the flaviviridae family. the genome consists made up of about 10,000 nucleotides and encodes a single polyprotein. hepatitis c virus (hcv) used host cell machinery to process its genome to synthesize 3 crucial viral proteases of which each has peptide cleaving role. these 3 proteases are also known as structural proteins. the hcv genome encodes 10 viral proteins: c, e1, e2, p7, ns2, ns3, ns4a, ns4b, ns5a and ns5b.