The Dangerous Five
Five mutations have been found in humans that increase the likelihood of death from COVID-19
Analysis of the genomes of victims of coronavirus infection and several thousand survivors after infection showed which mutations increase the likelihood of death from COVID-19. They increase this risk from 5 to 13 times. The scientists published the preliminary results of their work in the electronic scientific library medRxiv (Lu et al., Genetic risk factors for death with SARS-CoV-2 from the UK Biobank).
Over the past six months, scientists have identified several factors that are associated with an increased risk of infection with a new type of coronavirus and death from COVID-19. In particular, it is very difficult for elderly people, patients with heart and vascular diseases, diabetes, overweight, as well as carriers of the second blood group and a mutation in the APOE gene, which is associated with Alzheimer's disease.
Thanks to the data that the UK medical services collected as part of the UK BioBank project, scientists led by Julian Gau from the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the British Medical Research Council discovered four more similar risk factors that are associated with the genes of patients.
The UK Biobank project involves more than 400 thousand Britons who have agreed to donate their DNA for analysis and undergo a comprehensive medical examination. Scientists have suggested that many of them could have gotten a coronavirus infection in the last few months.
Genetic risk factors
Gau and his colleagues contacted almost six thousand BioBank participants and invited them to take a coronavirus test. In addition, they studied statistics on deaths from COVID-19 in the UK. In total, scientists found 1.4 thousand people among the participants of the UK BioBank who had an infection, as well as 193 deaths from coronavirus infection.
To find genetic differences between the deceased and recovered study participants, biologists compared sets of small mutations in their DNA. In total, they identified five variations in four genes – ERAP2, BRF2, TMEM181 and ALOXE3, which strongly influenced the likelihood of death from coronavirus infection.
The appearance of mutations in these genes, as the researchers note, increased the chances of dying from COVID-19 by about 5 to 13 times. Researchers suggest that this is due to the fact that all these genes are associated with the production of antibodies, stress suppression and regulation of the immune response to the appearance of viruses in the body.
Interestingly, such mutations are rarely present in the inhabitants of Britain and throughout Europe – each of them occurs in the genomes of only 0.1–0.6% of the inhabitants of the subcontinent. On the other hand, one of the variations of the ALOXE3 gene turned out to be characteristic of about 7% of people from Africa, which may explain why they are more vulnerable to COVID-19.
As the researchers suggest, there are other variations in the genome that affect the outcome of coronavirus infection. Their discovery and study, as Gau and his colleagues conclude, will be especially important in order to evaluate the effectiveness of vaccines and drugs that can destroy or suppress the reproduction of SARS-CoV-2 in the human body.
It should be added that the scientists' article was not reviewed by independent experts and editors of scientific journals, as is usually the case in such cases. Therefore, conclusions from it and similar articles should be treated with caution.
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