CompCorona: A Web Portal for Comparative Analysis of the Host Transcriptome of PBMC and Lung SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV, and MERS-CoV

Abstract

Motivation: Understanding the host response to SARS-CoV-2 infection is crucial for deciding on the correct treatment of this epidemic disease. Although several recent studies reported the comparative transcriptome analyses of the three coronaviridae (CoV) members; namely SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2, there is yet to exist a web-tool to compare increasing number of host transcriptome response datasets against the pre-processed CoV member datasets. Therefore, we developed a web application called CompCorona, which allows users to compare their own transcriptome data of infected host cells with our pre-built datasets of the three epidemic CoVs, as well as perform functional enrichment and principal component analyses (PCA). Results: Comparative analyses of the transcriptome profiles of the three CoVs revealed that numerous differentially regulated genes directly or indirectly related to several diseases (e.g., hypertension, male fertility, ALS, and epithelial dysfunction) are altered in response to CoV infections. Transcriptome similarities and differences between the host PBMC and lung tissue infected by SARS-CoV-2 are presented. Most of our findings are congruent with the clinical cases recorded in the literature. Hence, we anticipate that our results will significantly contribute to ongoing studies investigating the pre-and/or post-implications of SARS-CoV-2 infection. In addition, we implemented a user-friendly public website, CompCorona for biomedical researchers to compare users own CoV-infected host transcriptome data against the built-in CoV datasets and visualize their results via interactive PCA, UpSet and Pathway plots. Availability: CompCorona is freely available on the web at http://compcorona.mu.edu.tr Contact: tugbasuzek@mu.edu.tr