Interested in human genes involved in COVID-19 biology? NCBI’s RefSeq group has been hard at work compiling a set of human genes with roles in coronavirus infection and disease. You can now see and search for these genes and their regulatory elements in NCBI Gene and RefSeq.

Figure 1. Top section of the human ACE2 record in the Gene database. COVID-19 information can be found in the Summary and Annotation information sections.

You can:

1. Find the full set of genes and regulatory elements in NCBI Gene , only the genes, or only their regulatory elements.
2. See a synopsis of function for each gene in the NCBI Gene Summary section (Figure 1).
3. Explore the publications, pathways, interactions, and gene ontology information collected from PubChem, the Gene Ontology Annotation database, and other sources, all presented for easy access in the NCBI Gene records.
4.  Find the set of RefSeq transcripts, proteins, and targeted genomic sequences for these genes and regulatory elements, or combine the search with RefSeq Select to get one representative transcript  or protein for each gene.
5.  Search in Gene, Nucleotide or Protein for subsets of these genes involved in particular processes using Entrez queries.  Example searches: “involved in cytokine storm inflammatory response”[text word], “involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection”[text word] ,“involved in immune response or antiviral activity”[text word].

To create this set, we started from LitCovid, NCBI’s literature hub for current COVID-19 research, to find the genes currently under investigation for roles in COVID-19, plus sets of genes available in PubChem Pathways collected from multiple sources. We then reviewed each gene in detail to ensure that the RefSeq annotation was complete and accurate, and updated our Gene Summaries to reflect the current knowledge on this critical set of genes. We also added their regulatory elements to the RefSeq Functional Elements dataset. For more information, see our RefSeq Functional Elements posts on NCBI Insights.

Do you have a brand new paper, or did we miss a critical gene or aspect of a gene’s function? Help us connect genes and literature by submitting a GeneRIF, writing in to refseq-support@nlm.nih.gov, or by using the Feedback links on NCBI Gene pages to help crowdsource information about these genes.

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