Males and females appear to have different basal immunophenotype relevant to Covid

Tianyuan Liu, Leandro Balzano-Nogueira, Ana Lleo, View ORCID ProfileAna Conesa

doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.30.321059

This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?].

PDF: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.30.321059v1.full.pdf

Abstract

Worldwide COVID-19 epidemiology data indicate clear differences in disease incidence among sex and age groups. Specifically, male patients are at a higher death risk than females. However, whether this difference is the consequence of a pre-existing sex-bias in immune genes or a differential response to the virus has not been studied yet. We created DeCovid, an R shiny app that combines gene expression data of different human tissue from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project and the COVID-19 Disease Map gene collection to explore basal gene expression differences across healthy demographic groups. We used this app to study differential gene expression between men and women for COVID-19 associated genes. We identified that healthy women present higher levels in the expression of interferon genes and the JAK-STAT pathway leading to cell survival.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.30.321059v1