Seminar| Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Time: Tuesday, July 9th, 2024 , 15:00-16:00
Speaker: Lloyd T. Elliott, Simon Fraser University
Abstract: While COVID-19 is caused by the RNA virus SARS-CoV-2, genetic variation in human DNA may modulate the severity of the disease, or susceptibility to infection. The HostSeq project collected DNA samples and case reports from 10,059 SARS-CoV-2 infected Canadians between March 2020 and March 2023. This project contributed to the global Host Genetics Initiative (HGI), which has found 51 significant associations between aspects of COVID-19 and human genetic variation. We conduct a genome-wide association study on the HostSeq data and replicate two of the known HGI associations: LZTFL1/SLC6A20 and FOXP4. We also find suggestive evidence for two novel associations MRAS and WDR89 using gene-based analyses, and we construct a polygenic risk score explaining 1.01% of the variance in severe COVID-19. In this talk, I will discuss the methodology and results of this work, and directions for future work.