An Ancient Viral Epidemic Involving Host Coronavirus Interacting Genes More than 20,000 Years Ago in East Asia | Virus World | Scoop.it
From www.cell.com - June 27, 2021 1:19 PM

Souilmi et al. find that strong genetic adaptation occurred in human East Asian populations, at multiple genes that interact with coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2. The adaptation
started 25,000 years ago, and functional analysis of the adapting genes supports the occurrence of a corona- or related virus epidemic around that time in East Asia.

 

Highlights

 

  • Ancient viral epidemics can be identified through adaptation in host genomes
  • Genomes in East Asia bear the signature of an ∼25,000-year-old viral epidemic
  • Functional analysis supports an ancient corona- or related virus epidemic

Summary The current severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has emphasized the vulnerability of human populations to novel viral pressures, despite the vast array of epidemiological and biomedical tools now available. Notably, modern human genomes contain evolutionary information tracing back tens of thousands of years, which may help identify the viruses that have impacted our ancestors—pointing to which viruses have future pandemic potential. Here, we apply evolutionary analyses to human genomic datasets to recover selection events involving tens of human genes that interact with coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, that likely started more than 20,000 years ago. These adaptive events were limited to the population ancestral to East Asian populations. Multiple lines of functional evidence support an ancient viral selective pressure, and East Asia is the geographical origin of several modern coronavirus epidemics. An arms race with an ancient coronavirus, or with a different virus that happened to use similar interactions as coronaviruses with human hosts, may thus have taken place in ancestral East Asian populations. By learning more about our ancient viral foes, our study highlights the promise of evolutionary information to better predict the pandemics of the future. Importantly, adaptation to ancient viral epidemics in specific human populations does not necessarily imply any difference in genetic susceptibility between different human populations, and the current evidence points toward an overwhelming impact of socioeconomic factors in the case of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

 

Published in Current Biology (June 24, 2021): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.05.067