Postmortem MicroRNA Signatures as Predictive Markers in SARS-CoV-2 Infection.

Abstract

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) disease that emerged in December 2019 from Wuhan, China, has led to a worldwide outbreak that has resulted in 234,809,103 confirmed cases and caused more than 4,800,375 deaths worldwide. MicroRNAs could be involved in the SARS-CoV-2 infection, but not many studies have been performed to explore this in postmortem cases. The purpose of our study is to evaluate the postmortem expression of microRNA-6501-5p, microRNA-5695, and microRNA-29b-3p from bronchial secretions in positive and negative SARS-CoV-2 deaths and to evaluate their usefulness as predictive biomarkers in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 infection. During the autopsy procedure on 61 "suspected" deaths at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Timisoara, Romania, bronchial secretions were collected to detect SARS-CoV-2 infection postmortem. After the RT-PCR analysis, 44 SARS-CoV-2 cases were detected positive, while 17 cases were SARS-CoV-2 negative, which were considered as controls. From the panel of microRNAs, microRNA-6501-5p, microRNA-5695, and microRNA-29b-3p were upregulated in SARS-CoV-2 cases and down-regulated in non-SARS-CoV-2 cases. We concluded that using a panel of microRNAs as biomarkers in SARS-CoV-2 infection could aid in an early evaluation of the evolution of SARS-CoV-2-infected patients.