Systemic analysis of tissue cells potentially vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 infection by the protein-proofed single-cell RNA profiling of ACE2, TMPRSS2 and Furin proteases

Lulin Zhou; Zubiao Niu; Xiaoyi Jiang; Zhengrong Zhang; You Zheng; Zhongyi Wang; Yichao Zhu; Lihua Gao; Xiaoning Wang; Qiang Sun

In January, 2020, a novel coronavirus of unknown origin was identified to cause severe pneumonia in about 15-20% infected patients [1, 2] , the disease is currently called COVID-19 abbreviated from Coronavirus Disease 2019 [3] . The virus is phylogenetically similar (~76% amino acid identity) to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] , and was subsequently named as SARS-CoV-2 after the initial name of 2019-nCoV. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is much more contagious than SARS-CoV, and had infected more than 679,000 cases of COVID-19 from 199 countries and territories by March 29, 2020 , leading to more than 30 thousands of deaths with an average motility rate of about 4.6% [9] . The pandemic of COVID-19 is posing a global health emergency.