In other words, people with this variant who also had, say, a common cold “have this kind of superpower” of managing their COVID infection to the point where they don’t have symptoms, she explains. Hollenbach’s team found that this particular flavor of HLA is very good at recognizing garden variety coronaviruses, and the T-cells exposed to those were later very good at detecting important bits of SARS-CoV-2. And people who inherited two copies of the gene (one from each parent) were eight times more likely to never suffer symptoms. The researchers found that people who carried one copy of a version of a gene called HLA-B*15:01 were more than twice as likely to remain asymptomatic after being infected with COVID. Because T-cells have a long memory, they swoop in again fast the next time a similar virus invades. The proteins show little pieces of viruses to our T-cells, which take this as an invitation to attack. They were looking for differences in a group of genes called HLA (short for human leukocyte antigen) that carry the recipes for proteins that help our immune cells distinguish between our own biological detritus and unwelcome invaders. Hollenbach’s team recruited nearly 30,000 volunteers to download an app and, when they eventually tested positive for the virus, complete a questionnaire about their symptoms.Īlthough they’ve been collecting data from that cohort for years now, this study was limited to the time before people were vaccinated so the results could be cleanly interpreted, Hollenbach says. The team invited donors to participate in an ongoing project at UCSF called the COVID-19 Citizen Science Study. Collecting DNA, sequencing it and then tracking healthy people out in the community is an impossibly tall order.Ī team of researchers, led by the University of California, San Francisco’s Jill Hollenbach, found a clever way of getting around that problem by tapping into a group of people who had already given up their DNA: bone marrow donors. Scientists’ focus on the sickest patients wasn’t just because of the urgency to save lives, but because it’s simply easier to study people in a controlled setting like a hospital. Mild cases or asymptomatic infections have been relatively unstudied. What scientists are learning could help them develop better vaccines in the future - either for new variants of COVID-19 or entirely new forms of SARS. Why does one member of a household suffer a hacking cough but another not even a sniffle? Why does long COVID afflict some and not others? A cluster of new studies suggests some of the answers lie in our genes. (NIAID-RML via AP, File)Įven as COVID-19 has faded into the background for most of the public, our curiosity about the virus’s idiosyncrasies hasn’t waned. National Institutes of Health in February 2020 shows the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, indicated in yellow, emerging from the surface of cells, indicated in blue/pink, cultured in the lab. FILE - This undated, colorized electron microscope image made available by the U.S.
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