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A European study published Wednesday in the journal Nature identified a genetic segment on chromosome 3 that is inherited from Neanderthals and that exposes their carriers to an increased risk of severe COVID-19 disease.
In Europe, for example, 16% of people are carriers of these variants and in South Asia that percentage reaches 50%; in Bangladesh, say the authors, 63% of the population is a carrier. In Africa and East Asia, on the other hand, these genetic variants hardly exist in their respective populations.
The study is by Hugo Zeberg, from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and by Svante Pääbo, from the Max Planck Institute for Anthropology of Evolution.
The latter was the one that published the near-complete genome in 2010, confirming once and for all that there were even genetic exchanges between those extinct human beings about 35 thousand years ago and the homo sapiens, the modern human species.
It is precisely this ancestral genetic inheritance that the pandemic due to the new coronavirus is now experiencing with negative effects on its carriers.
Genetic variants on chromosome 3 inherited from Neanderthals join the list of other risk factors for SARS-CoV-2 infection, such as age, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, vitamin D disability, or obesity.
The two researchers had already advanced this hypothesis in July, after having analyzed a genetic segment of chromosome 3 in more than 3,000 hospitalized patients with Covid-19, and having compared it with the same region of the Neanderthal genome. But at the time, there was no certainty.
Since then, Hugo Zeberg and Svante Pääbo have deepened the study and now have new data that confirms the hypothesis, but does not offer an explanation for this three times greater risk of more severe COVID-19 infection, due to genetic variants. “Neanderthals ago 50 thousand years ”, as Hugo Zeberg underlined.
Svante Pääbo considers, for his part, “remarkable that the genetic inheritance of Neanderthals has such tragic consequences in the current pandemic” and argues that it is necessary “to investigate as soon as possible” why this happens.
