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 PMID:33564767  

Variation in predicted COVID-19 risk among lemurs and lorises.

Amanda D Melin | Joseph D Orkin | Mareike C Janiak | Alejandro Valenzuela | Lukas Kuderna | Frank Marrone | Hasinala Ramangason | Julie E Horvath | Christian Roos | Andrew C Kitchener | Chiea Chuen Khor | Weng Khong Lim | Jessica G H Lee | Patrick Tan | Govindhaswamy Umapathy | Muthuswamy Raveendran | R Alan Harris | Ivo Gut | Marta Gut | Esther Lizano | Tilo Nadler | Dietmar Zinner | Steig E Johnson | Erich D Jarvis | Olivier Fedrigo | Dongdong Wu | Guojie Zhang | Kyle Kai-How Farh | Jeffrey Rogers | Tomas Marques-Bonet | Arcadi Navarro | David Juan | Paramjit S Arora | James P Higham
bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology | 2021

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which in humans leads to the disease COVID-19, has caused global disruption and more than 1.5 million fatalities since it first emerged in late 2019. As we write, infection rates are currently at their highest point globally and are rising extremely rapidly in some areas due to more infectious variants. The primary viral target is the cellular receptor angiotensin-converting enzyme-2 (ACE2). Recent sequence analyses of the ACE2 gene predicts that many nonhuman primates are also likely to be highly susceptible to infection. However, the anticipated risk is not equal across the Order. Furthermore, some taxonomic groups show high ACE2 amino acid conservation, while others exhibit high variability at this locus. As an example of the latter, analyses of strepsirrhine primate ACE2 sequences to date indicate large variation among lemurs and lorises compared to other primate clades despite low sampling effort. Here, we report ACE2 gene and protein sequences for 71 individual strepsirrhines, spanning 51 species and 19 genera. Our study reinforces previous results and finds additional variability in other strepsirrhine species, and suggests several clades of lemurs have high potential susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Troublingly, some species, including the rare and Endangered aye-aye ( Daubentonia madagascariensis ), as well as those in the genera Avahi and Propithecus , may be at high risk. Given that lemurs are endemic to Madagascar and among the primates at highest risk of extinction globally, further understanding of the potential threat of COVID-19 to their health should be a conservation priority. All feasible actions should be taken to limit their exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

Pubmed ID: 33564767

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Associated grants

  • Agency: NIGMS NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R35 GM130333

Publication data is provided by the National Library of Medicine ® and PubMed ®. Data is retrieved from PubMed ® on a weekly schedule. For terms and conditions see the National Library of Medicine Terms and Conditions.

This is a list of tools and resources that we have found mentioned in this publication.


SAMTOOLS (tool)

RRID:SCR_002105

Original SAMTOOLS package has been split into three separate repositories including Samtools, BCFtools and HTSlib. Samtools for manipulating next generation sequencing data used for reading, writing, editing, indexing,viewing nucleotide alignments in SAM,BAM,CRAM format. BCFtools used for reading, writing BCF2,VCF, gVCF files and calling, filtering, summarising SNP and short indel sequence variants. HTSlib used for reading, writing high throughput sequencing data.

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MAFFT (tool)

RRID:SCR_011811

Software package as multiple alignment program for amino acid or nucleotide sequences. Can align up to 500 sequences or maximum file size of 1 MB. First version of MAFFT used algorithm based on progressive alignment, in which sequences were clustered with help of Fast Fourier Transform. Subsequent versions have added other algorithms and modes of operation, including options for faster alignment of large numbers of sequences, higher accuracy alignments, alignment of non-coding RNA sequences, and addition of new sequences to existing alignments.

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