Network-based Virus-Host Interaction Prediction with Application to SARS-CoV-2

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Abstract

COVID-19, caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has quickly become a global health crisis since the first report of infection in December of 2019. However, the infection spectrum of SARS-CoV-2 and its comprehensive protein-level interactions with hosts remain unclear. There is a massive amount of under-utilized data and knowledge about RNA viruses highly relevant to SARS-CoV-2 and their hosts’ proteins. More in-depth and more comprehensive analyses of that knowledge and data can shed new insight into the molecular mechanisms underlying the COVID-19 pandemic and reveal potential risks. In this work, we constructed a multi-layer virus-host interaction network to incorporate these data and knowledge. A machine learning-based method, termed Infection Mechanism and Spectrum Prediction (IMSP), was developed to predict virus-host interactions at both protein and organism levels. Our approach revealed five potential infection targets of SARS-CoV-2, which deserved public health attention, and eight highly possible interactions between SARS-CoV-2 proteins and human proteins. Given a new virus, IMSP can utilize existing knowledge and data about other highly relevant viruses to predict multi-scale interactions between the new virus and potential hosts.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.09.375394: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.


    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No funding statement was detected.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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