Abstract

Coronaviruses silently circulate in human and animal populations, causing mild to severe diseases. Therefore, livestock are important components of a “One Health” perspective aimed to control these viral infections. However, at present there is no example that considers pig genetic resources in this context. In this study, we investigated the variability of four genes (ACE2, ANPEP and DPP4 encoding for host receptors of the viral spike proteins and TMPRSS2 encoding for a host proteinase) in 23 European (19 autochthonous and three commercial breeds and one wild boar population) and two Asian Sus scrofa populations. A total of 2229 variants were identified in the four candidate genes: 26% of them were not previously described; 29 variants affected the protein sequence and might potentially interact with the infection mechanisms. The results coming from this work are a first step towards a “One Health” perspective that should consider conservation programs of pig genetic resources with twofold objectives: (i) genetic resources could be reservoirs of host gene variability useful to design selection programs to increase resistance to coronaviruses; (ii) the described variability in genes involved in coronavirus infections across many different pig populations might be part of a risk assessment including pig genetic resources.

Highlights

  • Coronaviruses silently circulate in human and animal populations, causing mild to severe diseases

  • We investigated the variability in several pig genes (ACE2, ANPEP, dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP4) and TMPRSS2) that can serve as receptors or protease for priming the infection of coronaviruses

  • We identified a total of 2229 variants in the four candidate genes and their flanking regions (ACE2 = 837; ANPEP = 173, DPP4 = 460 and TMPRSS2 = 759) by mining whole genome resequencing data produced from 22 European pig breeds and European wild boars (Supplementary Table S3)

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Summary

Introduction

Coronaviruses silently circulate in human and animal populations, causing mild to severe diseases. The results coming from this work are a first step towards a “One Health” perspective that should consider conservation programs of pig genetic resources with twofold objectives: (i) genetic resources could be reservoirs of host gene variability useful to design selection programs to increase resistance to coronaviruses; (ii) the described. Coronaviruses (CoVs) are enveloped single-stranded, positive-strand RNA viruses belonging to the Coronaviridae family, which includes four genera (Alphacoronavirus, Betacoronavirus, Gammacoronavirus, and Deltacoronavirus) Several viruses of this family constantly and silently circulate or emerge and re-emerge in the human and animal populations causing, in many cases, mild to severe ­diseases[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Several animal species can act as reservoirs of coronaviruses and different mechanisms have been suggested for host cell and cross-species transmission of coronaviruses i­nfections[14,15,16,17,18,19]

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