Genetic factors may also play a role in the coronavirus, as the new findings clearly show. (File)
Paris:
Patients with Covid-19 with an extract of Neanderthal DNA that entered the human genome around 60,000 years ago are at higher risk of serious complications from the disease, researchers have reported.
People infected with the new coronavirus, for example, who carry the genetic coding bequeathed by our first human cousins are three times more likely to need mechanical ventilation, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature.
There are many reasons why some people with Covid-19 end up in intensive care and others have only mild symptoms, if any.
Older age, being male, and pre-existing medical conditions can all increase the chances of a serious outcome.
But genetic factors can also play a role, as the new findings clearly show.
“It is striking that the genetic makeup of Neanderthals has such tragic consequences during the current pandemic,” said co-author Svante Paabo, director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Recent research from the Covid-19 Host Genetics Initiative has revealed that a genetic variant in a particular region of chromosome 3 – one of 23 chromosomes in the human genome – is associated with more severe forms of the disease.
This same region was known to harbor a genetic code of Neanderthal origin, so Paabo and his co-author Hugo Zeberg, also from Max Planck, decided to research a link to Covid-19.
Unevenly distributed
They found that a Neanderthal individual from southern Europe carried an almost identical genetic segment, which spans roughly 50,000 base pairs, the main building blocks of DNA.
Tellingly, two Neanderthals found in southern Siberia, along with a specimen of another primitive human species that also roamed Eurasia, the Denisovans, did not carry the revealing extract.
Modern humans and Neanderthals could have inherited the gene fragment from a common ancestor around half a million years ago, but it is much more likely that it entered the homo sapiens gene pool. by more recent crosses, the researchers concluded.
The study showed that the potentially dangerous chain of Neanderthal DNA is not evenly distributed across the world.
About 16% of Europeans carry it, and about half of the population in South Asia, the highest proportion – 63% – being in Bangladesh.
This could help explain why people of Bangladeshi descent living in Britain are twice as likely to die from Covid-19 as the general population, according to the authors.
In East Asia and Africa, the gene variant is virtually absent.
About 2% of the DNA of non-Africans around the world comes from Neanderthals, previous studies have shown.
Denisovan’s remains are also widespread but more sporadic, comprising less than one percent of the DNA among Asians and Native Americans, and around five percent of Indigenous Australians and the people of Papua New Guinea.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
