Back

Minor intron containing genes: Achilles' heel of viruses?

Wuchty, S.; White, A. K.; Olthof, A. M.; Drake, K.; Hume, A. J.; Olejnik, J.; Muehlberger, E.; Aguiar-Pulido, V.; Kanadia, R. N.

2022-10-04 systems biology
10.1101/2022.09.30.510319 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) revealed the worlds unpreparedness to deal with the emergence of novel pathogenic viruses, pointing to the urgent need to identify targets for broad-spectrum antiviral strategies. Here, we report that proteins encoded by Minor Intron-containing Genes (MIGs) are significantly enriched in datasets of cellular proteins that are leveraged by SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses. Pointing to a general gateway for viruses to tap cellular machinery, MIG-encoded proteins (MIG-Ps) that react to the disruption of the minor spliceosome are most important points of viral attack, suggesting that MIG-Ps may pan-viral drug targets. While contemporary anti-viral drugs shun MIG-Ps, we surprisingly found that anti-cancer drugs that have been repurposed to combat SARS-CoV-2, indeed target MIG-Ps, suggesting that such genes can potentially be tapped to efficiently fight viruses.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.