Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia; National Centre for Indigenous Genomics, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia.
University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Tucson, AZ, USA.
Curr Biol. 2021 Aug 23;31(16):3504-3514.e9. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.05.067. Epub 2021 Jun 24.
The current severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has emphasized the vulnerability of human populations to novel viral pressures, despite the vast array of epidemiological and biomedical tools now available. Notably, modern human genomes contain evolutionary information tracing back tens of thousands of years, which may help identify the viruses that have impacted our ancestors-pointing to which viruses have future pandemic potential. Here, we apply evolutionary analyses to human genomic datasets to recover selection events involving tens of human genes that interact with coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, that likely started more than 20,000 years ago. These adaptive events were limited to the population ancestral to East Asian populations. Multiple lines of functional evidence support an ancient viral selective pressure, and East Asia is the geographical origin of several modern coronavirus epidemics. An arms race with an ancient coronavirus, or with a different virus that happened to use similar interactions as coronaviruses with human hosts, may thus have taken place in ancestral East Asian populations. By learning more about our ancient viral foes, our study highlights the promise of evolutionary information to better predict the pandemics of the future. Importantly, adaptation to ancient viral epidemics in specific human populations does not necessarily imply any difference in genetic susceptibility between different human populations, and the current evidence points toward an overwhelming impact of socioeconomic factors in the case of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
当前严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒 2 (SARS-CoV-2) 大流行强调了人类种群对新型病毒压力的脆弱性，尽管现在有大量的流行病学和生物医学工具可用。值得注意的是，现代人类基因组包含可追溯到数万年前的进化信息，这有助于确定影响我们祖先的病毒——这些病毒具有未来大流行的潜力。在这里，我们应用进化分析来研究人类基因组数据集，以恢复涉及与冠状病毒（包括 SARS-CoV-2）相互作用的数十个人类基因的选择事件，这些事件可能发生在 2 万多年前。这些适应性事件仅限于东亚人群的祖先种群。多种功能证据支持古老的病毒选择压力，东亚是几种现代冠状病毒流行的地理起源地。与一种古老的冠状病毒或碰巧使用与冠状病毒与人类宿主相似相互作用的不同病毒之间的军备竞赛，可能在东亚祖先种群中发生了。通过更多地了解我们古老的病毒敌人，我们的研究强调了进化信息的前景，可以更好地预测未来的大流行。重要的是，特定人类种群对古代病毒流行的适应并不一定意味着不同人类种群在遗传易感性方面存在任何差异，而且目前的证据表明，在 2019 年冠状病毒病 (COVID-19) 的情况下，社会经济因素的影响是压倒性的。
