Review
Version 1
Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
Bulk and Single-Cell RNA-seq Elucidates Etiology of Severe COVID-19
Version 1
: Received: 29 December 2023 / Approved: 30 December 2023 / Online: 30 December 2023 (16:01:23 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Huminiecki, Ł. Bulk and Single-Cell RNA Sequencing Elucidate the Etiology of Severe COVID-19. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024, 25, 3280. Huminiecki, Ł. Bulk and Single-Cell RNA Sequencing Elucidate the Etiology of Severe COVID-19. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024, 25, 3280.
Abstract
COVID-19 was an inflammatory pneumonia caused by a respiratory infection with a coronavirus named SARS-CoV-2. Severely ill COVID-19 patients could die of acute pulmonary and systemic inflammation. Thus, there was a theory that long COVID-19 shared many similarities with systemic autoimmune diseases. There was also a theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could infect many cell- and tissue-types distributed throughout multiple organ systems of the body. I aim to review the above theories using unbiased high-throughput datasets cataloguing gene expression. Studies reviewed used the technology of next generation sequencing, either as bulk tissue RNA sequencing, or as single-cell RNAs sequencing; ingenious methods for signal deconvolution were then used to identify individual cell types. Datasets reviewed suggested that severe COVID-19 induced expression of genes associated with pro-inflammatory signaling, tissue development or remodeling, scarring, or cell death. The datasets also provided evidence for several inflammatory syndromes associated with COVID-19, such as neuronal COVID, acute respiratory disease syndrome, vascular inflammation, or multisystem inflammatory syndrome. Indeed, inflammatory signal during severe COVID-19 was reported in many cell types, for example in structural cells, in infiltrating immune cells, in the vascular system, or in circulating cells in the blood. There was also frequently a change in proportions of immune cell-types in the blood, epithelial cells in the lungs, or among infiltrating immune cells.
Keywords
COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; transcriptomics; RNA-seq; scRNA-seq; inflammation; pneumonia; neuronal COVID; acute respiratory disease syndrome; multisystem inflammatory syndrome
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Comments (0)
We encourage comments and feedback from a broad range of readers. See criteria for comments and our Diversity statement.
Leave a public commentSend a private comment to the author(s)
* All users must log in before leaving a comment
