Urinary Exosomes and COVID-19

National Heart, Lung, And Blood Institute

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

---- The COVID-19 epidemic has resulted in disruption of normal laboratory activities in the Knepper lab, causing a shift of effort to computational and bioinformatic projects to maintain productivity by laboratory members. Some of this effort is focused on COVID-19 itself, leveraging our expertise in systems biology and immunochemistry. One element is an evaluation of the glut of literature published already on COVID-19 and the kidney. Some of the current work overlaps our traditional interest in the role of the kidney in blood pressure regulation as angiotensin converting enzyme 2 is the main viral entry receptor. The ESBL COVID-19 team has published a Perspectives piece on this topic for the premier journal of nephrology, the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, allowing a remote teleworking graduate student to produce a first authored work even before setting foot in the lab. The second COVID-19 project is a more extensive computational systems biology work, using our own gene expression atlas data to predict and understand elements of the renal response to COVID-19. The third element is a big data integration program (tentatively called AbDesigner-Coronavirus) that allows sequence-based viewing of properties of each of the SARS-CoV-2 proteins with alignment of critical glycosylation sites, proteolytic cleavage sites, disulfide bridges, predicted immunogenicity, and conserved regions versus other coronaviruses (SARS-CoV, MERS, common cold strains).