Coronaviruses are Masters of Mimicry, New Study Finds
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Coronaviruses are masters of mimicry, new study finds:
Coronaviruses are adept at imitating human immune proteins that have been implicated in severe COVID-19 disease, a study from researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons has found.
The study was published online ahead of print in Cell Systems.
[...] "Viruses use mimicry for the same reason as plants and animals-deception," says Sagi Shapira, Ph.D., assistant professor of systems biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. "We hypothesized that identifying viral-protein look-alikes would give us clues to the way viruses-including SARS-CoV-2-cause disease."
In the study, Shapira used supercomputers to search for viral mimics with a program similar to 3-D facial recognition software. They scanned more than 7,000 viruses and over 4,000 hosts across Earth's ecosystems and uncovered 6 million instances of viral mimicry.
"Mimicry is a more pervasive strategy among viruses than we ever imagined," Shapira says. "It's used by all kinds of viruses, regardless of the size of the viral genome, how the virus replicates, or whether the virus infects bacteria, plants, insects or people."
[...] In a separate paper published in Nature Medicine, the Columbia researchers found evidence that functional and genetic dysregulation in immune complement and coagulation proteins are associated with severe COVID-19 disease. They found that people with macular degeneration (which is associated with enhanced complement activation) were more likely to die from COVID-19, that complement and coagulation genes are more active in COVID-19 patients, and that people with certain mutations in complement and coagulation genes are more likely to be hospitalized for COVID-19.
Journal Reference:
Gorka Lasso, Barry Honig, Sagi D. Shapira. A Sweep of Earth's Virome Reveals Host-Guided Viral Protein Structural Mimicry and Points to Determinants of Human Disease, Cell Systems (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2020.09.006
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