Knowledge synthesis from 100 million biomedical documents augments the deep expression profiling of coronavirus receptors

AJ Venkatakrishnan; Arjun Puranik; Akash Anand; David Zemmour; Xiang Yao; Xiaoying Wu; Ramakrishna Chilaka; Dariusz K Murakowski; Kristopher Standish; Bharathwaj Raghunathan; Tyler Wagner; Enrique Garcia-Rivera; Hugo Solomon; Abhinav Garg; Rakesh Barve; Anuli Anyanwu-Ofili; Najat Khan; Venky Soundararajan

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.24.005702 doi: bioRxiv preprint previous IHC study did report the staining of ACE2 in nasal and oral mucosa and the nasopharynx 33 . This expression is consistent with the high SARS-CoV-2 viral loads detected in nasal swab samples 28 . Intriguingly, mild degeneration of olfactory epithelium was observed in an immunosuppressed animal model infected with SARS-CoV 36 . These observations are correlated with emerging reports of anosmia/hyposmia (loss of smell) in otherwise asymptomatic COVID-19 patients from South Korea and other countries 37 . Such emerging clinical evidence emphasizes the need for further investigation into olfactory ACE2 expression via scRNA-seq and other modalities.