Are there people in our population, resistant to coronavirus?
Continue to study the question of coronavirus and what can be done about the bioinformatics connections associated with this I found an article on the fact that in lung cells the virus attaches to the ACE2 protein.
All viruses must multiply, and each virus needs to penetrate the host cell and the first stage on this path is to connection to the cell surface. In case of coronavoirus this is the ACE2 protein, which is encoded by the gene of the same name.
ACE2: https://www.proteinatlas.org/ENSG00000130234-ACE2/tissue
Compared to the small intestine — in the lungs, very ACE2 is in very small percentage cells. We have the opportunity to observe individual cells — let’s look at the cells of the lungs and intestines, which have ACE2 type in their cells. PanglaoDB: to answer this question
Now, let’s go back a bit to viruses and how they cling to our cells. Scientists have studied the human immunodeficiency virus, which attaches to the CCR5 receptor on human cells. There is even a 3D model obtained by x-ray diffraction analysis — how HIV attaches to CCR5:
and so it turned out that there is a certain percentage of people who genetically carry a slightly different version of the CCR5 gene — they have a 32 nucleotide deletion that does not really interfere with a person’s life, but prevents the HIV virus from attaching to the cells of such a person, making it in some sense more resistant to the virus. This mutation has a catchy name — rs333
having all these databases on hand is easy to see if there is anything similar for the ACE2 gene — respectively — whether there are at least potentially people who are resistant to coronavirus. At least we have all the information — firstly, there are the results of an X-ray diffraction analysis of the attachment of coronavirus to ACE2, let’s look at them
we see that coronavirus attaches to ACE2 in the region of 488th amino acid
Now we open the ACE2 gene in the database of gnomAD genetic polymorphisms, in which we previously looked at the frequencies of mutations in HIV resistance:
Now we look at what is interesting for mutations in the region of 450–500th amino acids:
we see that nature hasn’t created anything outstanding in this place, but for comparison we’ll look at CCR5 — the region of the 180th amino acid:
My prediction is that since it’s very popular to edit genomes right now, most likely in some laboratory they will make a version of ACE2 that, while remaining functionally active, will be invisible to coronavirus.
We will see if this forecast comes true and thanks for your attention!