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Review
. 2021 Nov 29:12:774922.
doi: 10.3389/fgene.2021.774922. eCollection 2021.

Current HLA Investigations on SARS-CoV-2 and Perspectives

Venceslas Douillard  1 , Erick C Castelli  2 , Steven J Mack  3 , Jill A Hollenbach  4 , Pierre-Antoine Gourraud  1 , Nicolas Vince  1 , Sophie Limou  1   5 ; Covid-19|HLA & Immunogenetics Consortium and the SNP-HLA Reference Consortium
Affiliations
Review

Current HLA Investigations on SARS-CoV-2 and Perspectives

Venceslas Douillard et al. Front Genet. .

Abstract

The rapid, global spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus during the current pandemic has triggered numerous efforts in clinical and research settings to better understand the host genetics' interactions and the severity of COVID-19. Due to the established major role played by MHC/HLA polymorphism in infectious disease course and susceptibility, immunologists and geneticists have teamed up to investigate its contribution to the SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 progression. A major goal of the Covid-19|HLA & Immunogenetics Consortium is to support and unify these efforts. Here, we present a review of HLA immunogenomics studies in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and reflect on the role of various HLA data, their limitation and future perspectives.

Keywords: COVID-19; HLA; MHC; SARS- CoV-2; association analysis; immunogenetics.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Number of significant SNP associations to any trait or pathology from the GWAS catalog within the whole genome divided in 350 bins (inspired from Lenz TL et al., 2016 (Lenz et al., 2016) & Kennedy et al., 2017 (Kennedy et al., 2017)). 4,080 associations fall in the extended MHC region (25–34Mb, GRCh38), 2,784 of which are located between 30 and 34 Mb where most HLA genes are found. Updated on January 14th, 2021.155,456 associations with p-value<5 × 10−8.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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