Coronavirus Host Genetics South Africa (COHG-SA) database-a variant database for gene regions associated with SARS-CoV-2 outcomes

Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 virus is responsible for the COVID-19 global public health emergency, and the disease it causes is highly variable in its clinical presentation. Clinical phenotypes are heterogeneous both in terms of presentation of symptoms in the host and response to therapy. Several studies and initiatives have been established to analyse and review host genetic epidemiology associated with COVID-19. Our research group curated these articles into a web-based database using the python application-server framework Django. The database provides a searchable research tool describing current literature surrounding COVID-19 host genetic factors associated with disease outcome. This paper describes the COHG-SA database and provides an overview of the analyses that can be derived from these data.

Fig. 1. An entity-relationship model of the available information fields provided by the web interface.

The four entities described in the database include Papers, Population, Variant detail, and Significant variants which each contain the associated attributes. The connecting lines showing the relationships of the entities are based on the engineering information style. The database column properties, glossary of terms, and interactors are found in Supplementary data A (Tables 1, 2, and 3). PK (Primary key), FK (Foreign key). Image created in Lucid Software Inc.