Increasing Host Cellular Receptor—Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2 (ACE2) Expression by Coronavirus may Facilitate 2019-nCoV Infection

Pei-Hui Wang; Yun Cheng

As the cellular receptor of SARS-CoV and 2019-CoV, ACE2 plays an essential role during these virus infections (Li et al., 2003; Zhou et al., 2020) . The ACE2 level is the decisive factor for 2019-nCoV infection . These observations drive us to explore whether ACE2 is a virus infection responsive gene. Here we analyzed the database of virus infected-or inflammatory cytokine-stimulated cells or tissues and clearly show that ACE2 can be upregulated by virus infection and inflammatory cytokine-stimulation. However, whether the upregulation by ACE2 by . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.24.963348 doi: bioRxiv preprint 1 9 / 2 2 the virus is achieved by virus infection-induced inflammatory cytokinesis is currently unknown. We already notice that the promoter region of ACE2 exists several immuneand cytokine-responsive transcript factor binding sites such as JUN. Next, we will evaluate whether ACE2 is upregulated by JNK signaling cascades. Importantly, the inducibility of ACE2 by inflammatory cytokines also implies that "cytokine storm" caused by 2019-nCoV not only damage host tissues but also may accelerate virus spread (Chen et al., 2020; Huang et al., 2020) .