FBXL8 is differentially expressed and transcriptionally induced in MERS coronavirus infection.
The coronavirus COVID19 pandemic is an emerging biosafety threat to the nation and the world (1). There are no treatments approved for coronavirus infection in humans (2) and there is a lack of information available regarding the basic transcriptional behavior of human cells and mammalian tissues following coronavirus infection. We mined two independent datasets (3, 4), public (3) and published (4) containing transcriptome data from infection models of the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus to discover genes that are differentially expressed in human cells after infection with MERS-CoV coronaviruses and assess their differential expression after infection with other coronavirus types. We identified the F-box and Leucine Rich Region (LRR) protein 8 (FBXL8) as a differentially expressed gene following infection of primary human cells and a human cell line with wild-type MERS-CoV and MERS-CoV London, respectively. FBXL8 induction after viral infection appears to be unique to MERS-CoV among coronaviruses studied.