Thijssen M, et al. - Researchers sought to describe and propose novel subgenotypes of hepatitis B virus (HBV) strains that are assigned as A8 and D12. They performed the phylogenetic analysis of four out of 133 HBV complete genome sequences, isolated from Belgian chronic carriers with African. Separate clusters supported by significant bootstrap values were identified in phylogenetic analyses of HBV genotypes A and D strains. Compared with the other known subgenotypes A (A1-A6 and quasi-subgenotypes) and subgenotypes D (D1-D11), separate clustering was evident in the two genotype A strains isolated from Congolese patients, and two genotype D strains isolated from Ghanaian. The novel strains (A8 and D12) and A1–A5 and D1-D11 subgenotypes exhibited the mean inter-subgenotypic nucleotide divergence over the full-length genome sequence higher than 4%. A8 is identified to be the basal lineage that diverged earlier than the other HBV subgenotypes A.