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.
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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.
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No external funding was received for this work.
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© 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.
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- Epidemiology and Global Health
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