Impact of SARS-CoV-2 Infection on Host Gene Expression Across Multiple Tissues at Single Cell Resolution

The clinical manifestations of COVID-19 infections are highly variable between individuals and are not localized to the lungs and airway passages as seen with other respiratory viruses. In order to define appropriate therapeutic targets and mitigation strategies for COVID-19 infections, it is important to understand the impact of COVID-19 across a wide variety of organs at the cellular level.

To that end, we have conducted a survey of the effects of SARS-COV-2 infection on host gene expression, at the single cell level, across a wide array of tissues obtained from autopsies of confirmed COVID-19 patients. Tissues from nineteen COVID-19 autopsy patients, including seven from the US and twelve from Europe, were analyzed using single nuclei RNA sequencing (snRNA Seq), along with three non-COVID controls.

Six to eight different organs from each patient were analyzed, including heart, lung, liver, kidney, ileum, colon, spleen, prostate and testes. In all, gene expression analyses were performed on approximately 150 unique tissue specimens. The project required implementation of new experimental workflows and technologies to enable safe handling of the samples.

Register for this webinar to hear a presentation of these methods along with the results detailing the impact of COVID-19 on host gene expression.

Speaker

Bruce Wang, Assistant Professor in Residence, Div. of Gastroenterology, UCSF

Bruce was born in China and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He went to college at Stanford and did his medical school, residency and fellowship at UCSF. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, he came back to UCSF to start his lab. Dr. Wang studies how the different cell types in the liver, in particular hepatocytes, are generated during development, patterned and maintained during adulthood, and regenerate after injury. His long-term goals are to improve the understanding of liver disease pathophysiology and develop novel methods of treatment for liver diseases, including cell replacement therapy. Currently, he has two major research focuses: 1) understanding the biology of adult hepatocyte stem cells and 2) developing a liver cell atlas. His lab takes innovative and integrated approaches to address these two areas using the tools of stem cell biology, developmental biology, genomics and tissue engineering.

Message Presenter