Knowledge synthesis of 100 million biomedical documents augments the deep expression profiling of coronavirus receptors
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic demands assimilation of all biomedical knowledge to decode mechanisms of pathogenesis. Despite the recent renaissance in neural networks, a platform for the real-time synthesis of the exponentially growing biomedical literature and deep omics insights is unavailable. Here, we present the nferX platform for dynamic inference from 45 quadrillion+ possible conceptual associations from unstructured text and triangulation with insights from Single Cell RNA-sequencing, bulk RNAseq and proteomics from diverse tissue types. A hypothesis-free profiling of ACE2 suggests tongue keratinocytes, olfactory epithelial cells, airway club cells and respiratory ciliated cells as potential reservoirs of the SARS-CoV-2 receptor. We find the gut as the putative hotspot of COVID-19, where a maturation correlated transcriptional signature is shared in small intestine enterocytes among coronavirus receptors(ACE2, DPP4, ANPEP). A holistic data science platform triangulating insights from structured and unstructured data holds potential for accelerating the generation of impactful biological insights and hypotheses.
Data availability
All data used in this manuscript were obtained from published and freely available sources online. A complete list of these can be found in Supplementary File 1.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
No external funding was received for this work.
Reviewing Editor
- Mone Zaidi, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, United States
Version history
- Received: April 18, 2020
- Accepted: May 27, 2020
- Accepted Manuscript published: May 28, 2020 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: July 20, 2020 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2020, Venkatakrishnan et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 4,099
- views
-
- 523
- downloads
-
- 45
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Epidemiology and Global Health
- Medicine
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
eLife has published the following articles on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.
-
- Medicine
The kidneys facilitate energy conservation through reabsorption of nutrients including glucose. Almost all the filtered blood glucose is reabsorbed by the kidneys. Loss of glucose in urine (glycosuria) is offset by an increase in endogenous glucose production to maintain normal energy supply in the body. How the body senses this glucose loss and consequently enhances glucose production is unclear. Using renal Slc2a2 (also known as Glut2) knockout mice, we demonstrate that elevated glycosuria activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which in turn drives endogenous glucose production. This phenotype was attenuated by selective afferent renal denervation, indicating the involvement of the afferent nerves in promoting the compensatory increase in glucose production. In addition, through plasma proteomics analyses we observed that acute phase proteins - which are usually involved in the body’s defense mechanisms against a threat – were the top candidates which were either upregulated or downregulated in renal Slc2a2 KO mice. Overall, afferent renal nerves contribute to promoting endogenous glucose production in response to elevated glycosuria and loss of glucose in urine is sensed as a biological threat in mice. These findings may be useful in improving the efficiency of drugs like SGLT2 inhibitors that are intended to treat hyperglycemia by enhancing glycosuria but are met with a compensatory increase in endogenous glucose production.