Integrative Bioinformatics Analysis Provides Insight into the Molecular Mechanisms of 2019-nCoV

Xiang He; Lei Zhang; Qin Ran; Anying Xiong; Junyi Wang; Dehong Wu; Feng Chen; Guoping Li

To further explore whether above activities could be triggered after coronavirus infection, we analyzed the expression profiles of epithelial cells which was infected by SARS-CoV. The biological process scores were obtained using GSVA (Gene Set Variation Analysis) and the pearson correlation between process scores and ACE2 expression was calculated. Similarly, while ACE2 increased after infection, production of cytokines, IL-1, IL-10 and IL-6 also increased, and the regulation of B cell activation was triggered to response. After 48 hours, virus activities such as viral entry into the host cell, virus life cycle, and viral transcription were enhanced. Besides, the T-cell cytokine secretion was increased, and T-cell activation was promoted ( Figure 2B ). Then, we used ssGSEA (Single Sample Gene Set Enrichment Analysis) to quantify the immune infiltrates in healthy people epithelial cells and cells after infection. We found that in normal samples, the immune cells were not activated so that the correlation between infiltration and ACE2 expression was not significant ( Figure 2C ). However, in the SARS-CoV infected cells, the ACE2 was significantly correlated with neutrophils, NK cells, Th17 cells, Th2 cells, Th1 cells, DC ( Figure 2D ).