1. Altered and allele-specific open chromatin landscape reveals epigenetic and genetic regulators of innate immunity in COVID-19
- Author
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Zhang, Bowen, Zhang, Zhenhua, Koeken, Valerie A. C. M., Kumar, Saumya, Aillaud, Michelle, Tsay, Hsin-Chieh, Liu, Zhaoli, Kraft, Ane R. M., Soon, Chai Fen, Odak, Ivan, Bosnjak, Berislay, Volt, Anna, Deutsche COVID-19 OMICS Initiative (DeCOI), Swertz, Morris A., Ohler, Uwe, Geffers, Robert, Illig, Thomas, Huehn, Jochen, Saliba, Antoine-Emmanuel, Sander, Leif Erik, Förster, Reinhold, Xu, Cheng-Jian, Cornberg, Markus, Schulte, Leon N., and Li, Yang
- Subjects
Single-cell ,Multi-omics integration ,COVID-19 ,Single-cell ATAC-seq ,Single-cell RNA-seq - Abstract
While SARS-CoV-2 infection causes mild respiratory disease in most individuals, a small group of patients develops severe COVID-19. Dysfunctional innate immune responses have been identified to contribute to differences in COVID-19 severity, but the key regulators are still unknown. Here, we present an integrative single-cell epigenetics, transcriptomic, and genetics analysis of peripheral blood mononuclear cells from hospitalized and convalescent COVID-19 patients. In classical monocytes, we identified 41.3% of significantly up-regulated genes in hospitalized COVID-19 patients potentially induced by differential chromatin accessibility. Sub-clustering and motif-enrichment analyses of monocytes reveal disease condition-specific regulation by transcription factors, such as C/EBPs and SPI1, and their targets, including a long-noncoding RNA LUCAT1, which further regulates interferon responses and is associated with the need for oxygen supply of COVID-19 patients. The interaction between C/EBPs and LUCAT1 was validated through loss-of-function experiments. Finally, we investigated genetic risk variants that exhibit allele-specific open chromatin (ASoC) in promoters/enhancers of COVID-19 patients. Integrating our data with publicly available expression quantitative trait loci and chromosomal interactions indicates that ASoC SNP rs6800484-C is associated with lower expression of CCR2, which may contribute to higher viral loads in the lungs and a higher risk of COVID-19 hospitalization. Altogether, our study highlights the diverse genetic and epigenetic regulators that contribute to the innate immune responses of different COVID-19 patients.
- Published
- 2022
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