Human miRNAs to Identify Potential Regions of SARS-CoV-2

Nimisha Ghosh^1,+, Indrajit Saha^2,+,*, Nikhil Sharma ^3,+, Jnanendra Prasad Sarkar^4,5

¹Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, Institute of Technical Education and Research,
Siksha 'O' Anusandhan (Deemed to be University), Bhubaneswar, India
²Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technical Teachers' Training and Research, Kolkata, India
³Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India
⁴Larsen & Turbo Infotech Ltd, Pune, India
⁵Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India
*Correspondence should be addressed to team leader : indrajit@nitttrkol.ac.in
⁺These team members contributed equally to this work

ABSTRACT

More than a year has passed but the world is still struggling against COVID-19 due to the havoc created by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its multiple variants. Keeping this perspective, in this work, we have hypothesized a new approach in order to identify potential regions in SARS-CoV-2 similar to the human miRNAs and thus have similar consequences as caused by the human miRNAs in human body. Therefore, the same way by which human miRNAs are inhibited can be applied for such potential regions of virus by providing drugs to the interacting human proteins. In this regard, multiple sequence alignment technique Clustal Omega is used to align 2656 human miRNAs with SARS-CoV-2 reference genome to identify the potential regions within the virus reference genome having high similarities with the human miRNAs. The potential regions in virus genome are identified based on the highest number of nucleotide match, greater than or equal to 5 at a genomic position, for the aligned miRNAs. As a result, 41 potential SARS-CoV-2 regions are identified consisting of 268 human miRNAs. Among these 41 potential regions, some top regions belong to Nucleocapsid, RdRp, Helicase and ORF8. To understand the biological significance of these potential regions, the targets of the human miRNAs are considered for KEGG pathways, protein-protein and drug-protein interaction analysis as the human miRNAs are similar to the potential regions of SARS-CoV-2. As a consequence, significant pathways are found which lead to comorbidities. Subsequently, drugs like Emodin, Bicalutamide, Vorinostat etc. are identified which may be used for clinical trial.