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

We further found that this transcriptional mirroring of coronavirus entry receptors was not unique to small intestine but rather also strongly present among renal proximal tubule epithelial cells, where ACE2, DPP4, and ANPEP expression tends to be observed in the same cellular subsets. These observations suggest the existence of a transcriptional network spanning tissues and cell types which may drive and/or regulate coronavirus receptor expression. The question of whether coronaviruses have evolved to exploit such a network may be relevant to pursue, particularly given that downregulation of ACE2 by SARS-CoV has been reported previously and is associated with poor clinical outcomes 31, 47 . Perhaps other coronaviruses can similarly modulate the expression of their entry receptors to impact the clinical course of the induced disease.