Determining crucial genes associated with COVID-19 based on COPD Findings✶,✶✶

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compbiomed.2020.104126Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Association of respiratory disease COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) with COVID-19.

  • Discuss the resemblance between SARS, MERS and COVID-19 causal agents.

  • Uses gene module analysis and pathway information to determine the role of genes which may be associated with COVID-19.

  • Few interesting genes were found which might be potentially useful in designing drugs targeting COVID-19.

Abstract

Genes act in groups known as gene modules, which accomplish different cellular functions in the body. The modular nature of gene networks was used in this study to detect functionally enriched modules in samples obtained from COPD patients. We analyzed modules extracted from COPD samples and identified crucial genes associated with the disease COVID-19. We also extracted modules from a COVID-19 dataset and analyzed a suspected set of genes that may be associated with this deadly disease. We used information available for two other viruses that cause SARS and MERS because their physiology is similar to that of the COVID-19 virus. We report several crucial genes associated with COVID-19: RPA2, POLD4, MAPK8, IRF7, JUN, NFKB1, NFKBIA, CD40LG, FASLG, ICAM1, LIFR, STAT2 and CCR1. Most of these genes are related to the immune system and respiratory organs, which emphasizes the fact that COPD weakens this system and makes patients more susceptible to developing severe COVID-19.

Keywords

COVID-19
SARS
MERS
GeneCard
Pathway

Cited by (0)

Pooja Sharma received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tezpur University in 2018. Her research interests include Machine Learning, Bioinformatics and Data mining.

Anuj K Pandey is pursuing his Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical Engineering at NIT Durgapur, India. His research interest includes Power Electronics, Optimization, Soft Computing and Artificial Intelligence.

Dhruba K Bhattacharyya received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tezpur University in 1999. His research areas include Data Mining, Network Security and Content-based Image Retrieval. Prof. Bhattacharyya has published 250 + research papers in leading international journals and conference proceedings. In addition, Dr Bhattacharyya has written and edited many books.

View Abstract