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A new interesting article has been published in Biochem Biophys Res Commun. 2020 Mar 18. pii: S0006-291X(20)30523-4. doi: 10.1016/j.bbrc.2020.03.044. [Epub ahead of print] and titled:

Single cell RNA sequencing of 13 human tissues identify cell types and receptors of human coronaviruses.

Authors of this article are:

Qi F, Qian S, Zhang S, Zhang Z.

A summary of the article is shown below:

The new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) outbreak from December 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei, China, has been declared a global public health emergency. Angiotensin I converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), is the host receptor by SARS-CoV-2 to infect human cells. Although ACE2 is reported to be expressed in lung, liver, stomach, ileum, kidney and colon, its expressing levels are rather low, especially in the lung. SARS-CoV-2 may use co-receptors/auxiliary proteins as ACE2 partner to facilitate the virus entry. To identify the potential candidates, we explored the single cell gene expression atlas including 119 cell types of 13 human tissues and analyzed the single cell co-expression spectrum of 51 reported RNA virus receptors and 400 other membrane proteins. Consistent with other recent reports, we confirmed that ACE2 was mainly expressed in lung AT2, liver cholangiocyte, colon colonocytes, esophagus keratinocytes, ileum ECs, rectum ECs, stomach epithelial cells, and kidney proximal tubules. Intriguingly, we found that the candidate co-receptors, manifesting the most similar expression patterns with ACE2 across 13 human tissues, are all peptidases, including ANPEP, DPP4 and ENPEP. Among them, ANPEP and DPP4 are the known receptors for human CoVs, suggesting ENPEP as another potential receptor for human CoVs. We also conducted “CellPhoneDB” analysis to understand the cell crosstalk between CoV-targets and their surrounding cells across different tissues. We found that macrophages frequently communicate with the CoVs targets through chemokine and phagocytosis signaling, highlighting the importance of tissue macrophages in immune defense and immune pathogenesis.Copyright © 2020 Shenzhen Third People’s Hospital. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Check out the article’s website on Pubmed for more information:

[link-preview url=https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32199615 forceshot=true]

This article is a good source of information and a good way to become familiar with topics such as: ACE2; Co-receptor; Coronaviruses; Macrophage; SARS-CoV-2; scRNA-seq.

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