Identification and Ontology Term Enrichment Analysis of Genes Associated with COVID-19 and Acute Kidney Disease

ABSTRACT

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is the main comorbidity of COVID-19, and the pathogenesis remains unclear. This study first performed a gene set enrichment analysis of 6 AKI-related Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) studies and identified 3,876 AKI-associated genes. By incorporating COVID-19 related interactions from BioGRID, we further found 1,027 genes associated with both COVID-19 and AKI. Our Gene ontology (GO) enrichment analysis of these genes showed that viral and inflammation-related biological processes played important roles on COVID-19 related AKI. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pathways ranked second in the top 5 KEGG-enriched pathways, in which 66 enriched genes were all upregulated in the kidney tissue of the above 6 GEO studies. Ontology modeling is currently undergoing to systematically and logically represent the AKI pathogenesis process in COVID-19 patients. © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors.