Analyzing Host-Viral Interactome of SARS-CoV-2 for Identifying Vulnerable Host Proteins during COVID-19 Pathogenesis
This work identifies potential therapeutic targets for COVID-19 by analyzing host-viral interactomes, offering insights for drug development for patients suffering from severe COVID-19.
This paper integrates existing protein and genetic interaction data to construct a host protein-protein interaction network of 1432 human proteins involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection. By analyzing network centrality and functional enrichment, the authors identified several potential therapeutic targets, including RBX1, HSPA5, and ITCH, which are central to the network and associated with multiple diseases.
The development of therapeutic targets for COVID-19 treatment is based on the understanding of the molecular mechanism of pathogenesis. The identification of genes and proteins involved in the infection mechanism is the key to shed out light into the complex molecular mechanisms. The combined effort of many laboratories distributed throughout the world has produced the accumulation of both protein and genetic interactions. In this work we integrate these available results and we obtain an host protein-protein interaction network composed by 1432 human proteins. We calculate network centrality measures to identify key proteins. Then we perform functional enrichment of central proteins. We observed that the identified proteins are mostly associated with several crucial pathways, including cellular process, signalling transduction, neurodegenerative disease. Finally, we focused on proteins involved in causing disease in the human respiratory tract. We conclude that COVID19 is a complex disease, and we highlighted many potential therapeutic targets including RBX1, HSPA5, ITCH, RAB7A, RAB5A, RAB8A, PSMC5, CAPZB, CANX, IGF2R, HSPA1A, which are central and also associated with multiple diseases