Host-Viral Infection Maps Reveal Signatures of Severe COVID-19 Patients

• They introduce Viral-Track, a computational method that globally scans unmapped single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data for the presence of viral RNA, enabling transcriptional cell sorting of infected versus bystander cells.
• Since current single cell technique relies on polyA reverse transcripton, viral RNA is also sequenced.
• First, map to host genome, then discard junk reads.
• Viral reads are de novo assembled,  then de-multiplexed.
• non-immune cell(CD45-) has high viral reads compared to immune (CD45+) cells.
• 気管支肺胞洗浄液(Bronchoalveolar Lavage Fluid:BALF)
• 400 - 15,000 transcripts from Virus are found in severe patients, but not in mild patients