COVID-19: The Effect of Host Genetic Variations on Host–Virus Interactions

Abstract

Spurred into action by the COVID-19 pandemic, the global scientific community has, in a short of period of time, made astonishing progress in understanding and combating COVID-19. Given the known human protein machinery for (a) SARS-CoV-2 entry, (b) the host innate immune response, and (c) virus–host interactions (protein–protein and RNA–protein), the potential effects of human genetic variation in this machinery, which may contribute to clinical differences in SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis and help determine individual risk for COVID-19 infection, are explored. The Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) was used to show that several rare germline exome variants of proteins in these pathways occur in the human population, suggesting that carriers of these rare variants (especially for proteins of innate immunity pathways) are at risk for severe symptoms (like the severe symptoms in patients who are known to be rare variant carriers), whereas carriers of other variants could have a protective advantage against infection. The occurrence of genetic variation is thus expected to motivate the experimental probing of natural variants to understand the mechanistic differences in SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis from one individual to another.

Association of ABO blood group with COVID-19 severity, acute phase reactants and mortality

“…Apart from documentary evidence of auto-antigenicity and reporting of hematological complications, many studies have investigated the pathway to viral entry into the human hosts [ 5 , 6 ]. One such hypothesis resides in the ABO blood group and its association with the severity of diseases such as Hepatitis B Virus (HBV), Middle-Eastern Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS), and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS) [ 7 ].…”

Application of digital education in undergraduate nursing and medical interns during the COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic review

“…The global scientific community has made great progress in combating COVID-19 ( Chakravarty, 2021 ). With the advent of vaccines against COVID-19 and the implementation of social isolation measures worldwide, we have entered a period of relaxation of restrictions, during which the national economy and health education have been temporarily restored.…”

Conceptual causal framework to assess the effect of SARS-CoV-2 variants on COVID-19 disease severity among hospitalized patients

“…Host genetic variants may partially account for the residual variability in disease severity between patients after adjusting for other risk factors such as age and comorbidities [ 12 , 60 ]. Further, it is not unlikely that host genetic variants influence the probability to be infected with a particular SARS-CoV-2 variant given the importance of host-pathogen interactions [ 61 ]. Collecting information on the ethnicity of the patient may partially account for this bias [ 62 – 64 ], but residual confounding is likely to exist.…”