Single-cell RNA expression profiling of ACE2, the putative receptor of Wuhan 2019-nCov

By Yu Zhao, Zixian Zhao, Yujia Wang, Yueqing Zhou, Yu Ma, Wei Zuo. bioRxiv, 2020

908 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A novel coronavirus (2019-nCov) was identified in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China in December of 2019. This new coronavirus has resulted in thousands of cases of lethal disease in China, with additional patients being identified in a rapidly growing number internationally. 2019-nCov was reported to share the same receptor, Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), with SARS-Cov. Here based on the public database and the state-of-the-art single-cell RNA-Seq technique, we analyzed the ACE2 RNA expression profile in the normal human lungs. The result indicates that the ACE2 virus receptor expression is concentrated in a small population of type II alveolar cells (AT2). Surprisingly, we found that this population of ACE2-expressing AT2 also highly expressed many other genes that positively regulating viral reproduction and transmission. A comparison between eight individual samples demonstrated that the Asian male one has an extremely large number of ACE2-expressing cells in the lung. This study provides a biological background for the epidemic investigation of the 2019-nCov infection disease, and could be informative for future anti-ACE2 therapeutic strategy development.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Obstetrics and Gynecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc52257030e643343d4d85e58b2d1f6c6aa56850

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Citations in the corpus

Neurological Manifestations of Hospitalized Patients with COVID-19 in Wuhan, China: a retrospective case series study (2020, background): “Recently, ACE2 is identified as the functional receptor for SARS-CoV-2 [3], which is present in multiple human organs, including nervous system and skeletal muscle [11].”
Single cell RNA sequencing of 13 human tissues identify cell types and receptors of human coronaviruses (2020, background): “As recently reported, both nCoV and SARS-CoV could use ACE2 protein to gain entry into the cells[4].”
New insights on the antiviral effects of chloroquine against coronavirus: what to expect for COVID-19? (2020, background): “There is indication that SARS-CoV-2 binds to angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) expressed on pneumocytes [85 , 99] .”
Machine learning using intrinsic genomic signatures for rapid classification of novel pathogens: COVID-19 case study (2020, background): “The human ACE2 receptor has also been identified as the potential receptor for the COVID-19 virus and represents a potential target for treatment [41, 42].”
Expression of the SARS-CoV-2 cell receptor gene ACE2 in a wide variety of human tissues (2020, background): “A recent study uncovered that ACE2-expressing lung cells were more abundant in Asian males [9] , potentially explaining the elevated susceptibility of males to SARS-CoV-2 infection.”
Understanding SARS-CoV-2-Mediated Inflammatory Responses: From Mechanisms to Potential Therapeutic Tools (2020, background): “…National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Diseases, School of Systems Biology, George Mason University, Manassas, VA 20110, USA enzyme 2 (ACE2), as SARS-CoV for infection, suggesting the likelihood of the same set of cells being targeted and infected (Zhao et al. 2020; Zhou et al. 2020).”
Neurologic Manifestations of Hospitalized Patients With Coronavirus Disease 2019 in Wuhan, China. (2020, background): “Acute cerebrovascular disease 9 (1-18) 10 (1-18) 1 (1) NA”
Seasonality of Respiratory Viral Infections. (2020, background): “Given that the expression of the receptor for both SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (114, 115), appears to be concentrated in a small population of type II alveolar cells (116),we speculate that the low humidity and temperature environment would promote the viability of SARS-”