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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 22 2021, @01:20AM   Printer-friendly

A Genetic Variant You May Have Inherited From Neanderthals Reduces the Risk of Severe COVID-19:

[...] SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, impacts people in different ways after infection. Some experience only mild or no symptoms at all while others become sick enough to require hospitalization and may develop respiratory failure and die.

Now, researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) in Japan and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany have found that a group of genes that reduces the risk of a person becoming seriously ill with COVID-19 by around 20% is inherited from Neanderthals.

[...] Last year, Professor Svante Pääbo and his colleague Professor Hugo Zeberg reported in Nature[1] that the greatest genetic risk factor so far identified, doubling the risk to develop severe COVID-19 when infected by the virus, had been inherited from Neanderthals.

Their latest research builds on a new study, published in December last year from the Genetics of Mortality in Critical Care (GenOMICC) consortium in the UK, which [...] pinpointed additional genetic regions on four chromosomes that impact how individuals respond to the virus.

Now, in a study published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)[2], Professor Pääbo and Professor Zeberg show that one of the newly identified regions carries a variant that is almost identical to those found in three Neanderthals – a ~50,000-year-old Neanderthal from Croatia, and two Neanderthals, one around 70,000 years old and the other around 120,000 years old, from Southern Siberia.

[...] To try to understand how this variant affects COVID-19 outcomes, the research team took a closer look at the genes located in this region. They found that three genes in this region, called OAS, code for enzymes that are produced upon viral infection and in turn activate other enzymes that degrade viral genomes in infected cells.

"It seems that the enzymes encoded by the Neanderthal variant are more efficient, reducing the chance of severe consequences to SARS-CoV-2 infections," Professor Pääbo explained.

[...] They found that the variant increased in frequency after the last Ice Age and then increased in frequency again during the past millennium. As a result, today it occurs in about half of people living outside Africa and in around 30% of people in Japan. In contrast, the researchers previously found that the major risk variant inherited from Neanderthals is almost absent in Japan.

"The rise in the frequency of this protective Neanderthal variant suggests that it may have been beneficial also in the past, maybe during other disease outbreaks caused by RNA viruses," said Professor Pääbo.

Obligatory, see also: Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neandertal Lineage.

Journal References:
[1] Hugo Zeberg, Svante Pääbo. The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2818-3)
[2] Hugo Zeberg, Svante Pääbo. A genomic region associated with protection against severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neandertals [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2026309118)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @01:35PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @01:35PM (#1115967)
    “Race” is a social construct.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @03:07PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @03:07PM (#1115990)

    "social construct" is a social construct

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24 2021, @09:47AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24 2021, @09:47AM (#1116796)

      Now you're getting it.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @03:19PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @03:19PM (#1115996)

    I can tell your social construct from a drop of your spit with a DNA test.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @01:36AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @01:36AM (#1116272)
      An yet race is still a social construct. There is only one race, Homo sapiens. Same as there is only one race of family pets - Camus familiar is. “Dog breeds” is bullshit. They can all interbreed. Same as all humans can interbreed. That there are differences in DNA means nothing - even relatives have different DNA and can be told apart by DNA, but it doesn’t make them different races.

      Race is a social construct with no basis in science, and attempts to use DNA to claim otherwise show ignorance of DNA and its place in differentiating between (a) individuals, and (b) species. Since even identical twins don’t have identical DNA thanks to changes after the icon bifurcated, you would have to argue that every individual is a different race, since you can tell them apart by DNA. Or admit that DNA doesn’t support the idea of races within a species, an race is merely a social construct with no basis in science or reality.

      After all, if you’re going to classify people by colour, why skin colour and not hair or eye colour? It’s just as arbitrary and just as stupid.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @02:50AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @02:50AM (#1116293)

        Why not classify dogs by colour if that’s the basis for race? We have white dogs of all sizes, and black dogs of all sizes, same as humans, so if we can classify humans by colour why not dogs?

        Explain why it’s okay to claim humans are different races based on something as insignificant as colour, but not dogs. Or admit that both are just arbitrary constructs.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24 2021, @11:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24 2021, @11:55PM (#1117038)

    Not it's not, you dumb bitch. Regurgitating your indoctrination doesn't make it any truer. I guess you can't face the fact that you have paid, or have mountains of debt, for a BS "education".