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. 2020 Feb 24;12(1):8.
doi: 10.1038/s41368-020-0074-x.

High expression of ACE2 receptor of 2019-nCoV on the epithelial cells of oral mucosa

Hao Xu #  1 , Liang Zhong #  1 , Jiaxin Deng #  1 , Jiakuan Peng  1 , Hongxia Dan  1 , Xin Zeng  1 , Taiwen Li  2 , Qianming Chen  1
Affiliations

High expression of ACE2 receptor of 2019-nCoV on the epithelial cells of oral mucosa

Hao Xu et al. Int J Oral Sci. .

Abstract

It has been reported that ACE2 is the main host cell receptor of 2019-nCoV and plays a crucial role in the entry of virus into the cell to cause the final infection. To investigate the potential route of 2019-nCov infection on the mucosa of oral cavity, bulk RNA-seq profiles from two public databases including The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Functional Annotation of The Mammalian Genome Cap Analysis of Gene Expression (FANTOM5 CAGE) dataset were collected. RNA-seq profiling data of 13 organ types with para-carcinoma normal tissues from TCGA and 14 organ types with normal tissues from FANTOM5 CAGE were analyzed in order to explore and validate the expression of ACE2 on the mucosa of oral cavity. Further, single-cell transcriptomes from an independent data generated in-house were used to identify and confirm the ACE2-expressing cell composition and proportion in oral cavity. The results demonstrated that the ACE2 expressed on the mucosa of oral cavity. Interestingly, this receptor was highly enriched in epithelial cells of tongue. Preliminarily, those findings have explained the basic mechanism that the oral cavity is a potentially high risk for 2019-nCoV infectious susceptibility and provided a piece of evidence for the future prevention strategy in dental clinical practice as well as daily life.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Bulk RNA-seq analysis of public datasets. a Violin plot of ACE2 expression in para-carcinoma normal tissues from TCGA, colored by organs. b Bar plot of ACE2 expression in normal tissues from FANTOM5 CAGE dataset, colored by organs. c Bar plot of ACE2 expression of para-carcinoma normal tissues from TCGA in different oral sites, colored by oral sites; d Boxplot of ACE2 in two kinds of oral sites from TCGA, colored by oral sites
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Single cell RNA-seq analysis of oral tissues from independent dataset. a Seven-cell types were identified by the cell markers; cells were clustered by UMAP method. b Heatmap of cell markers for identifying cell types. c Scatter plots of all the cells with ACE2 expression. d Violin plot of ACE2 expression across different oral sites. e Violin plot of ACE2 expression across different cell types. f Scatter plots of tongue epithelial cells with ACE2 expression
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