The scRNA-seq expression profiling of the receptor ACE2 and the cellular protease TMPRSS2 reveals human organs susceptible to COVID-19 infection

Jing Qi; Yang Zhou; Jiao Hua; Liying Zhang; Jialin Bian; Beibei Liu; Zicen Zhao; Shuilin Jin

The scRNA-seq data of the lung, nose, trachea, and bronchus in the respiratory system were collected for the analysis. In the lung, AT2 cells contain an average of 0· 79% ACE2-expressed cells across 8 samples (Fig. 1a, Fig. 1b , Supplementary File: Figure S1 -S8, Table 2 ), and the expression levels of ACE2 and TMPRSS2 are high in AT2 cells (Fig. 1c, Fig. 1d ). The data of nose (nasal brushing epithelial cells, nasal turbinate epithelial cells, and nasal airway epithelial cells) contains ACE2-expressed and TMPRSS2-expressed cell clusters (Supplementary File: Figure S9 -S11), and the ratios of ACE2-expressed cells of these cell clusters are all over 0· 79% (Table 2) , thus the nose is identified as the high-risk organ. Low ratio of ACE2-expressed cells in the bronchus and trachea means they are low-risk infection organs (Supplementary File: Figures S12-S13). . 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 It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the .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/10.1101/2020.04.16.045690 doi: bioRxiv preprint