Most frequent South Asian haplotypes of ACE2 share identity by descent with East Eurasian populations

Anshika Srivastava; Rudra Kumar Pandey; Prajjval Pratap Singh; Pramod Kumar; Avinash Arvind Rasalkar; Rakesh Tamang; George van Driem; Pankaj Shrivastava; Gyaneshwer Chaubey

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0238255

Most frequent South Asian haplotypes of ACE2 share identity by descent with East Eurasian populations

PLoS One. 2020 Sep 16;15(9):e0238255. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238255. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Anshika Srivastava¹, Rudra Kumar Pandey¹, Prajjval Pratap Singh¹, Pramod Kumar², Avinash Arvind Rasalkar³, Rakesh Tamang⁴, George van Driem⁵, Pankaj Shrivastava⁶, Gyaneshwer Chaubey¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Zoology, Cytogenetics Laboratory, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India.
² National Centre for Disease Control, Delhi, India.
³ Redcliffe Life Sciences Pvt Ltd, Electronic City, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India.
⁴ Department of Zoology, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India.
⁵ Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
⁶ Department of Home (Police), DNA Fingerprinting Unit, State Forensic Science Laboratory, Government of MP, Sagar, India.

Abstract

It was shown that the human Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is the receptor of recent coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and variation in this gene may affect the susceptibility of a population. Therefore, we have analysed the sequence data of ACE2 among 393 samples worldwide, focusing on South Asia. Genetically, South Asians are more related to West Eurasian populations rather than to East Eurasians. In the present analyses of ACE2, we observed that the majority of South Asian haplotypes are closer to East Eurasians rather than to West Eurasians. The phylogenetic analysis suggested that the South Asian haplotypes shared with East Eurasians involved two unique event polymorphisms (rs4646120 and rs2285666). In contrast with the European/American populations, both of the SNPs have largely similar frequencies for East Eurasians and South Asians, Therefore, it is likely that among the South Asians, host susceptibility to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 will be more similar to that of East Eurasians rather than to that of Europeans.

Publication types

Comparative Study
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2
Asia / epidemiology
Asian People / genetics*
Betacoronavirus / physiology
COVID-19
Coronavirus Infections / ethnology
Coronavirus Infections / genetics*
Haplotypes / genetics
Human Migration
Humans
Linkage Disequilibrium
Pandemics
Peptidyl-Dipeptidase A / genetics*
Phylogeny
Pneumonia, Viral / ethnology
Pneumonia, Viral / genetics*
Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide*
Receptors, Virus / genetics*
SARS-CoV-2
White People / genetics

Substances

Receptors, Virus
Peptidyl-Dipeptidase A
ACE2 protein, human
Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2

Grants and funding

This work is supported by the National Geographic Explorer grant HJ3-182R-18. Redcliffe Life Sciences Pvt Ltd. India provided support in the form of salaries for author AR. The specific roles of this author is articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.