SARS-CoV-2 Entry Genes Are Most Highly Expressed in Nasal Goblet and Ciliated Cells within Human Airways

By W. Sungnak, N. Huang, C. Bécavin, M. Berg, R. Queen, Monika Litviňuková, Carlos Talavera-López, H. Maatz, D. Reichart, F. Sampaziotis and 71 more. Nature Medicine, 2020

2,359 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigated SARS-CoV-2 potential tropism by surveying expression of viral entry-associated genes in single-cell RNA-sequencing data from multiple tissues from healthy human donors. We co-detected these transcripts in specific respiratory, corneal and intestinal epithelial cells, potentially explaining the high efficiency of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. These genes are co-expressed in nasal epithelial cells with genes involved in innate immunity, highlighting the cells’ potential role in initial viral infection, spread and clearance. The study offers a useful resource for further lines of inquiry with valuable clinical samples from COVID-19 patients and we provide our data in a comprehensive, open and user-friendly fashion at www.covid19cellatlas.org. An analysis of single-cell transcriptomics datasets from different tissues shows that ACE2 and TMPRSS2 are co-expressed in respiratory, corneal and intestinal epithelial cell populations, and that respiratory expression of ACE2 is associated with genes involved in innate immunity.

Subfields: Immunology, Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/524fe14d50687690ef9815fe8183d027d10ac849

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Immunology

1. A. Aschenbrenner
2. Zemin Zhang
3. Nir Yosef
4. Joachim L. Schultze

In Infectious Diseases

1. A. Aschenbrenner
2. Joachim L. Schultze
3. Ralph S. Baric

Citations in the corpus

• COVID-19 and the human innate immune system (2021, background): “In absence of cell-type-specific expression maps of SARSCoV-2 viral entry-associated genes, the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) Lung Biological Network investigated the prevalence of ACE2 and TMPRSS2 in the body by analyzing their expression in single-cell RNA sequencing data (scRNA-seq) from multiple tissue”
• Cross-tissue immune cell analysis reveals tissue-specific features in humans (2022, background): “Expression of these genes in lung DCs was also observed in published scRNA-seq datasets (45, 46) (fig.”
• SARS-CoV-2 Reverse Genetics Reveals a Variable Infection Gradient in the Respiratory Tract (2020, background): “Our single-cell RNA-ISH technology extended the description of ACE2 in respiratory epithelia on the basis of scRNA-seq data (Sungnak et al., 2020).”
• SARS-CoV-2 Receptor ACE2 Is an Interferon-Stimulated Gene in Human Airway Epithelial Cells and Is Detected in Specific Cell Subsets across Tissues (2020, neutral): “Global single-cell profiling efforts such as the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) initiative are ideally poised to rapidly share critical data and enhance our understanding of disease during emergent public health challenges (Sungnak et al., 2020).”