COVID in Your Genes: The Risk Factors

Naked Genetics


Since march we've been discussing how. Covert nineteen varies between different people depending on their genes and back at the start. The evidence was patchy. Look how far we've come a recent study combines. The work of a couple thousand geneticists using dna kindly contributed for millions of people around the world to pin down which common genetic variations are doing us dirty. The study hasn't yet been peer reviewed. But it's such a large collaboration that we're going to spend the whole program learning what they've found hughes geneticists nathan pearson from the cove in nineteen hosts genetics initiative. We have uneven examples where human genetic variation shapes who gets given infection and maybe shapes how severely they get it at cetera so we had kind of a hunch going in like other infectious diseases. This might play out similarly and given. That's our expertise. That's our our bailiwick. What can we bring to the table along with everyone else from you know. Virologists themselves to public health. Scientists to people are studying all facets at every scale of society and our response to it. What can we bring to understanding. How responses vary perhaps in part by the genetic spellings the dna in us. And did you have a hunch. About how much of role. Genetics would play personally. I didn't go in with a strong hunch. Either way and i think that people who are more expert in corona viruses or in viruses generally in in our responses to them might have gone in with stronger or weaker. Hunches on that front but for me it was sort of an open question and i think for a lot of our colleagues we felt similarly we. We weren't gonna put all our chips on that part of the of of the board but that we might have some say let they give you an example. There you know one of the better studied viruses before this one that afflicts people was hiv. And we know for example that human genetic variation in a couple of parts of our genome strongly shapes who gets hiv generally controls the load of that virus over time. It's a very different kind of virus so we can't extrapolate too much from hiv because it stays in us. It's a retrovirus. But we knew that it played a role in addition to the variation hiv one hiv to etcetera in the virus. Itself

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