RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 An ancient viral epidemic involving host coronavirus interacting genes more than 20,000 years ago in East Asia
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.11.16.385401
DO 10.1101/2020.11.16.385401
A1 Souilmi, Yassine
A1 Lauterbur, M. Elise
A1 Tobler, Ray
A1 Huber, Christian D.
A1 Johar, Angad S.
A1 Enard, David
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/01/13/2020.11.16.385401.abstract
AB The current 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 COVID-19.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.