Likely molecular mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis are revealed by network biology

University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers, led by Shahid Mukhtar, Ph.D., associate professor of biology in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences, have now built an interactome that includes the lung-epithelial cell host interactome integrated with a SARS-CoV-2 interactome. Applying network biology analysis tools to this human/SARS-CoV-2 interactome has revealed potential molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis for SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. The UAB research, published in the journal iScience, identified 33 high-value SARS-CoV-2 therapeutic targets, which are possibly involved in viral entry, proliferation and survival to establish infection and facilitate disease progression. These molecular insights may foster effective therapies, using combinations of existing drugs, for patients with COVID-19.

So far in 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has killed nearly 1 million people worldwide and 200,000 in the United States.

The UAB researchers took many steps to generate the Calu-3-specific human-SARS-CoV-2 interactome, or CSI, that was the starting point for their network biology analyses.

They began from a comprehensive human interactome of experimentally validated protein-protein interactions, posted online in 2015, and then manually curated other protein-protein interactions from four subsequent interactome studies. The resulting human interactome contained 18,906 nodes and 444,633 “edges” — the term for the links between protein nodes.

Read the full story from University of Alabama at Birmingham here.