Bioinformatic-based Study to Investigate the Structure and Function of Pro-inflammatory Cytokines TNFα and IL-6 Involved in the Pathogenesis of COVID-19.

Abstract

Background & objective: Besides the clinical and laboratory research on the COVID-19 virus, the bioinformatics study in the field of genetics of immunity to COVID-19 is of particular importance. In this account, studies show that in patients with COVID-19, the level of tumor necrosis alpha (TNFα) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) is high and in severe cases of COVID-19, the production of IL-6, TNF-α, and other cytokines increases profoundly. On the other hand, investigating the molecular structure and receptors of IL-6 and TNFα and the structural analysis of the receptor proteins may potentially help to develop new therapeutic plans for COVID-19 infection.

Methods: To identify genes with significant and different expressions in patients with COVID-19 in a microarray data set containing transcriptional profiles from GEO as a functional genomic database the GEO query package version 2.64.2 in a programming language R version 4.2.1 was downloaded. In this way, functional enrichment analysis for DEGs, WikiPathways, REGO, gene ontology, and STRING database was also investigated and employed.

Results: The structure and function of pro-inflammatory cytokines TNFα and IL-6 involved in the pathogenesis of COVID-19 were investigated, and in general, after performing various analyses in this study and extracting A series of genes with different expressions from the KEGG database, the final 5 DEGs include CXCL14, CXCL6, CCL8, CXCR1, TNFRSF10, and the relationship and expression effects of them were observed in different pathways.

Conclusion: IL-6 and TNFα were involved in immunological processes that had a direct and indirect relationship with the activation of cytokines, including IL6 and TNF-a, and cytokine storm, and this indicates their role in the formation of problems and complications, including ARDS, in COVID-19 patients. Of course, determining the effectiveness of each of these genes requires more specialized and clinical studies.