An Evolutionary Insight Into the Heterogeneous Severity Pattern of the SARS-CoV-2 Infection

Rabail Zehra Raza; Sumra Wajid Abbasi

doi:10.3389/fgene.2022.859508

An Evolutionary Insight Into the Heterogeneous Severity Pattern of the SARS-CoV-2 Infection

Front Genet. 2022 Mar 22:13:859508. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2022.859508. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Rabail Zehra Raza¹, Sumra Wajid Abbasi¹

Affiliation

¹ NUMS Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Multidisciplinary Studies, National University of Medical Sciences, Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Abstract

The ongoing pandemic of COVID-19 has elaborated an idiosyncratic pattern of SARS-CoV-2-induced symptoms in the human host. Some populations have succumbed to the SARS-CoV-2 infection in large numbers during this pandemic, whereas others have shown a resilient side by manifesting only milder or no symptoms at all. This observation has relayed the onus of the heterogeneous pattern of SARS-CoV-2-induced critical illness among different populations to the host genetic factors. Here, the evolutionary route was explored and three genetic loci, i.e., rs10735079, rs2109069, and rs2236757, associated with COVID-19 were analyzed. Among the three, the risk allele A at genetic locus rs2236757 residing in the IFNAR2 gene was observed to have undergone recent positive selection in the African population.

Keywords: COVID-19; SNP variants; host genetic factors; natural selection; population genomics.