Computational Prediction of the Comprehensive SARS-CoV-2 vs. Human Interactome to Guide the Design of Therapeutics

Kevin Dick; Kyle K Biggar; James R Green

Of the GO-terms observed from the current analysis, the highly over-represented biological processes in Table 6 are the most interesting. Notably, the top-9 GO-terms have a 96.98 fold enrichment given that the predicted set of human interactors contain all of the proteins from the H. sapiens reference (i.e. the number of proteins present in the reference are also in the sample: 2/2, 8/8, and 3/3 among the top-3, respectively). We specifically highlight the "antigen processing and presentation of exogenous peptide antigen via MHC class Ib" (GO:0002477) and the "calcium ion transport from cytosol to endoplasmic reticulum" (GO:1903515). Moreover, the top-ranking cellular component GO-terms (Table 7) show notable over-representation of "MHC class Ib protein complex" (GO:0032398), "MHC class I protein complex" (GO:0042612), and numerous proteasome complex terms. While only a shallow analysis is presented here, a more involved investigation into these predicted interactions promises to reveal putative targets for novel inhibitory peptides.