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

Pei-Hui Wang; Yun Cheng

SARS-CoV S protein and 2019-nCoV S protein engages angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as their entry receptor (Li et al., 2003; Zhou et al., 2020; Wrapp et al., 2020) . ACE2 is the cellular entry receptor of SARS-CoV and 2019-nCoV, which plays an indispensable role for SARS-CoV infection (Li et al., 2003; Zhou et al., . 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 It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the .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 4 / 2 2 2020). ACE2 is a type I membrane protein expressed in the lung, heart, kidney, and intestine . Enhanced expression of ACE2 accelerates SARS-CoV infection and spread, while silencing of ACE2 blocks its entry into cells (Li et al., 2003) . Organs and tissues with high ACE2 abundance like the lung, kidney and small intestine are the infection targets of 2019-nCoV . Taken together, these findings reveal that the expression level of ACE2 is extremely important for the successful infection of SARS-nCoV and 2019-nCoV. Here we analyzed the various microarray database of virus infected-or inflammatory stimulated-animals and cells, and clearly show that virus infection including SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV can obviously upregulate ACE2 expression, which suggests that 2019-nCoV may use similar strategies to augment its infection and spread.