Bioinformatics Reveals Link Between COVID-19 Symptom Severity And Immune System Adaptivity
Fios Genomics recently performed bioinformatics analysis on a COVID-19-related dataset. Our team analysed NanoString data from whole blood samples collected at Cochin Hospital (Paris, France) to identify characteristic immune signatures in patients with “mild to moderate”, “severe” or “critical” cases of COVID-19. This data was originally published as part of a study by Hadjadj et al., 2020, Science.
Fios bioinformaticians independently reanalysed the NanoString dataset to validate and expand upon the conclusions of the original study. Our team performed association analysis for differentially expressed genes and gene signatures, along with functional enrichment analysis to identify pathways and GO terms that were associated with disease severity.
These data analyses revealed that more serious COVID-19 cases typically have less activity in the adaptive immune system and possibly more activity in the innate immune system. (Innate immunity refers to the non-specific defence mechanisms deployed by the immune system automatically after a pathogen enters the body, while adaptive immunity refers to an antigen-specific immune response).
Bioinformatics analysis also revealed widespread changes in the expression of immune markers such as TLR5, BST1, LILRA5 and MAPK14 in COVID-19 patients compared to healthy controls. TLR5 recognizes bacterial flagellin and may reflect the presence of secondary bacterial infections in patients with severe and critical cases of COVID-19.
Data analysis also detected changes in the activity of key immune pathways including interferon, interleukin, T-cell receptor (TCR), toll-like receptor (TLR) and major histocompatibility complex (MHC) signalling. The team found that pathways involved in the adaptive immune response as well as interleukin and interferon signalling, were more likely to be enriched in “mild to moderate” cases, whereas early immune pathways such as TLR signalling, were enriched in severe and critical cases.
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COVID-19 Data Visualisation App
Download NanoString Data Analysis Report
Fill in the form below to access the data analysis report our team created. Here, bioinformatics analysis helped to identify characteristic immune signatures in whole blood samples. Expression of 579 immunology-related genes was evaluated using NanoString datasets.
