Abstract
Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic is caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 that has infected in a year more than 200 million people and has killed almost 4.5 million people worldwide. This infection affects mainly certain groups of people that have high susceptibility to present severe COVID-19 due to comorbidities. Moreover, the long-COVID-19 comprises a series of symptoms that may remain in some patients for months after infection that further compromises health of individuals. Therefore, this pandemic poses a serious emergency worldwide. Thus, since this pandemic is profoundly affecting economic and social life of societies, a deeper understanding of SARS-CoV-2 infection cycle could help to envisage novel therapeutic alternatives that limit or stop COVID-19. Several recent findings have unexpectedly found that mitochondria play a critical role in SARS-CoV-2 cell infection. Indeed, it has been suggested that this organelle could be the origin of its replication niches, the double membrane vesicles (DMV), as its been observed with another virus. In this regard, mitochondria derived vesicles (MDV), involved in mitochondria quality control, were discovered more than 10 years ago and interestingly there is a population characterized by a double membrane. MDV shedding is induced by mitochondrial stress and it has a fast assembly dynamic, reason that perhaps has precluded their identification in electron microscopy or tomography studies. These and other features of MDV together with recent SARS-CoV-2 protein interactome with the host and other findings linking SARS-CoV-2 to mitochondria, support that these vesicles are the precursors of SARS-CoV-2 induced DMV. In this work, the celular, molecular, phenotypical and biochemical evidence that supports this hypothesis is reviewed and integrated into the current model of SARS-CoV-2 cell infection. In this scheme, some relevant questions are raised as pending topics for research that would help in the near future to test this hypothesis. The intention (abstract truncated).
Highlights
The coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic is caused by the positive-sense single-stranded RNA coronavirus, SARSCoV-2, that has infected, in a year, more than 200 million people and has killed almost 4.5 million people worldwide[1] since it has no definitive and effective treatment until today
This PM–mitochondria pathway mediates caveolin transport to mitochondria in myocytes after stress[47] (Figure 3A), and it could be an early step of what we called plasma membrane-mitochondria bridges, which we recently described in astrocytes (Figure 3B)[48], involved in the emerging pathway of PM–mitochondria interactions[49]
This possibility is supported by different observations reviewed here and would include mitochondria infection by vRNA, which could occur by its uptake from the cytoplasm through the the MOM (TOM) complex or direct targeting to mitochondria of PM caveolae containing SARS-CoV-2 (Figure 1, question mark 3), as it has been reported in myocytes and astrocytes
Summary
The coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic is caused by the positive-sense single-stranded RNA coronavirus, SARSCoV-2, that has infected, in a year, more than 200 million people and has killed almost 4.5 million people worldwide[1] since it has no definitive and effective treatment until today. Further support for the notion that mitochondria could be targets of SARS-CoV-2 vRNA infection that leads to DMV assembly, comes from the observation that shows mitochondria containing newly synthesized vRNA19 This suggests that mitochondria somehow get vRNA that could induce stress and shedding of MDV (/DMV), where the vRNA replication machinery and newly synthesized vRNA are mostly located[19]. A tantalizing possibility is that vRNA accesses mitochondria directly from vesicles shed from the plasma membrane (PM) in which SARS-CoV-2 is endocytosed This PM–mitochondria pathway mediates caveolin transport to mitochondria in myocytes after stress[47] (Figure 3A), and it could be an early step of what we called plasma membrane-mitochondria bridges, which we recently described in astrocytes (Figure 3B)[48], involved in the emerging pathway of PM–mitochondria interactions[49]. It is possible that the diversity of receptors and entry pathways exploited by SARS-CoV-2, together with the fast dynamics of PM–mitochondria communication can obscure the caveolae role
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