R. Eils, HiDiH Berlin
Service cetnter: Heidelberg Center for Human Bioinformatics – HD-HuB
The Hub for Innovations in Digital Health (HiDiH), with locations in Berlin and Heidelberg and headed by Roland Eils, is currently focusing most research activities on understanding the host response upon SARS-CoV-2 infection. At a very early stage, we started to investigate non-SARS-CoV-2 infected single cell sequencing data of the lower respiratory tract (bronchia and lung) with regards to the presence of the host factors involved in virus entry, such as the receptor ACE2 and the proteases TMPRSS2, FURIN, CTSB/L. This study is accepted by the EMBO J (Lukassen et al, SARS-CoV-2 receptor ACE2 and TMPRSS2 are primarily expressed in bronchial transient secretory cells. EMBO Journal in press, 2020). As part of the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, we have access to COVID-19 patient samples, allowing for investigation of molecular and cellular changes upon SARS-CoV-2 infection using scRNA sequencing as well as epigenomic profiling using methylation sequencing. The HiDiH de.NBI team supports the COVID-19 research activities via data management of all sequencing data, initial processing of the raw sequencing reads (One Touch Pipeline, OTP (Reisinger et al, Journal of Biotechnology 261: 53-62,2017)) and by the development of web applications as display and analysis tools of next-generation sequencing data, such as Magellan.
Please visit https://www.hidih.org/ for frequent updates of our research activities and additional links to relevant COVID-19 projects.
