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We obtained RNA-Seq datasets of virus-infected human cells from the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra/) using the SRA prefetch tool (v 2.9.3). The following accession numbers were used: PRJNA495858, PRJNA605905, PRJNA551246, PRJNA559203, PRJNA577579, PRJNA549926, PRJNA555053, PRJNA545099, PRJNA615032, and PRJNA609228. In addition, the transcriptomic findings of DENV-2 infected A549 cells reported in our previous study were included in the subsequent comparative analysis. Illumina RNA-seq reads, including those of single-end and double-end sequences, were used as expression data. Each dataset contained mock treated cells as the control, and each treatment was performed with 2-4 biological replicates. According to the conditions of viral infection, including the viral strain, time after infection, and cell type, abbreviations were assigned to the corresponding samples. For example, "HCV_12h_mock" represents the control sample for the sample that was analyzed 12 h after hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. Summary of samples used in this study is shown in Table 1, and details of experiments and methods could be found in the original reports corresponding to the datasets.
Virus Hours post-infection Virus strain Cell Accession number DENV-2 72 TSV01 A549 PRJNA552644 Flu-A – PR8 A549 PRJNA495858 Flu-B – B/Yamagata A549 PRJNA605905 ZIKV 48 FSS13025 hiNPCs PRJNA551246 48 PE243V hiNPCs HCV 12 – Huh7 PRJNA559203 36 – Huh7 60 – Huh7 WNV – – A549 PRJNA577579 CCHFV 24 – Huh7 PRJNA549926 72 – Huh7 24 – HepG2 72 – HepG2 EBV – Akata differentiated NOKs PRJNA555053 – Akata undifferentiated NOKs MV – – MSC (5H) PRJNA545099 – – MSC (hTERT) RSV 24 A2 A549 PRJNA615032 SARS-CoV-2 24 USA-WA1/2020 A549 PRJNA615032 24 USA-WA1/2020 NHBE RHV 6 – Calu3 PRJNA609228 24 – Calu3 Table 1. Summary of samples used in this study.
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Data analyses were performed as described previously (Wang et al. 2020). Briefly, the quality of raw reads were assessed with FastQC (v 0.11.5) (Andrews 2010), and the low-quality reads were filtered out with Trimmomatic (v 0.38) (Bolger et al. 2014). The resulting reads were aligned upon the human genome GRCh38 with HISAT2 (v 2.1.0) (Kim et al. 2015), and counted using the "primary" option of featureCounts (v 1.6.3) (Liao et al. 2014), where only reads uniquely assigned to a single feature were counted. This approach may underestimate the total expression of features to some extent and slightly bias the expression values of older HERV elements, but allows convincing counts to be assigned to individual features. Conversely, if multiple mapped reads are not excluded, false positive expression of many undesired HERV loci may be detected. Therefore, using the unique mapped reads is more likely to avoid false positives for transcribed HERV loci. Ensembl GRCh38 version 95 GTF was used for annotated genes, while the GTF was derived from HERVd database containing the most extensive HERV loci for HERV loci annotation (Paces et al. 2004). In each experiment, features with less than 5 assigned reads across all samples were discarded.
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The DESeq2 package was executed for differential expression analysis of human genes and HERV loci (Love et al. 2014). Adjusted P < 0.05 and | log2 fold change | > 1 were considered to be significant (Haase et al. 2015). When both HERV and its neighboring human gene were both differentially expressed (DE), they were collectively referred to as DEHERV-G pair. Subsequently, we calculated the number of DEHERV-G pairs in each dataset; we used Venn in TBtools to show their overlap and Gene Locations in TBtools to show the location of their components on chromosomes (Chen et al. 2020). The distribution of HERV loci relative to human genes (within exons, introns, UTRs, and 5 kb up- and down-stream regions) was determined using the read distribution module in the RSeQC package (v 3.0.1) (Wang et al. 2012).
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PPI network was constructed by using the Search Tool for the Retrieval of Interacting Genes/Proteins (STRING) database retrieval tool (http://stringdb.org/) (Szklarczyk et al. 2019). Interactors with a combined confidence score of ≥ 0.4 were selected, and based on these scores, the PPI network was illustrated using Cytoscape (Shannon et al. 2003).
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The differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in the DEHERV-G pairs were subjected to Gene Ontology (GO) functional analysis and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis using the clusterProfiler package (Yu et al. 2012). The GO categories include biological process (BP), cellular component (CC), and molecular function (MF). To reduce redundancy, the enrichGO analysis was followed by the "simplify" function as suggested by the author. Adjusted P < 0.05 was defined the threshold of statistical significance.
RNA-Seq Datasets
Reads Mapping and Counting
Differential Expression Analysis
Construction of Protein–Protein Interaction (PPI) network
Functional Enrichment Analysis
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As reported previously, we have observed that DENV infection induces HERVs activation. To explore whether this phenomenon is ubiquitous in viral infections, we used data obtained by the infection of human cells with multiple exogenous viruses to study the activation of HERV. Specifically, we performed a total of 179 SRA runs to download 21 high-throughput RNA-seq datasets from the SRA database and then re-analyzed them. These data covered 11 different viruses, including Flu-A, influenza B virus (Flu-B), Zika virus (ZIKV), HCV, measles virus (MV), West Nile virus (WNV), Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV), respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), rhinovirus (RHV), EBV, and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2 virus (SARS-CoV-2). In addition, we included our previously published DENV-2 infection data in this study for a comprehensive comparative analysis. The virus strains, infected cells, and time after infection of each sample are shown in Table 1.
After quality control of the raw reads, we obtained a total of about 1 TB of clean reads, and over 85% of reads, as a whole, were aligned with the human GRCh38 reference genome. Subsequently, using Ensembl GRCh38_95 GTF and the created HERV GTF as the annotation files, we detected human genes and HERVs expression in all analyzed samples. We found that approximately 1% of total reads corresponded to HERVs and that approximately 60% of total reads were mapped to human gene annotations. An overview of the RNA-Seq data is presented in Supplementary Table S1.
The principal component analysis of the transformed expression of all 22 datasets is shown in Fig. 1. We found that samples were clustered within group and dispersed among the groups, and the samples of the same virus under different infection conditions were relatively closely distributed. For the expressions of human genes, HCV, CCHFV, and ZIKV groups were clearly subdivided from other virus samples. The overall expression of HERVs was similar in most datasets, whereas EBV and HCV samples were significantly different compared to the other groups.
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Following conventional practices, we defined significantly differentially expressed human genes and HERV loci (DEGs and DEHERVs) as those with | log2 fold change | ≥ 1 with an adjusted P of ≤ 0.05. Data corresponding to DEGs and DEHERVs in all datasets are listed in Table 2. We found that the induction effects of some viruses, such as DENV-2 (4701 DEGs and 3033 DEHERVs), Flu-A (9130 DEGs and 6799 DEHERVs), and Flu-B (5544 DEGs and 2486 DEHERVs), were obvious. Compared to other respiratory viruses (like RSV with 659 DEGs and 75 DEHERVs), the SARS-CoV-2 USA-WA1/2020 strain (published in March 2020) had a weaker induction effect (33 DEGs and 6 DEHERVs in A549 cells, 127 DEGs, and 17 DEHERVs in normal human bronchial epithelial (NHBE) cells). A total of 30, 549 DEGs and 16, 707 DEHERVs were detected. After adjusting for redundancy, 16, 248 DEGs and 11, 427 DEHERVs were obtained, indicating that there was a crossover between the HERVs loci activated by different viral infections. In addition, correlation analysis showed that the number of DEHERVs was positively correlated with the number of DEGs (R2 = 0.9484) (Supplementary Fig. S1).
Dataset Number of DEGa Number of DEHERVb Up-regulated Down-regulated Total Up-regulated Down-regulated Total DENV-2 2942 1759 4701 2352 681 3033 Flu-A 5341 3789 9130 4810 1989 6799 Flu-B 3667 1877 5544 1408 1078 2486 ZIKV_F 1072 274 1346 536 68 604 ZIKV_P 408 49 457 270 12 282 HCV_12h 4 4 8 0 0 0 HCV_36h 354 49 403 152 2 154 HCV_60h 1118 345 1463 208 33 241 WNV 825 52 877 349 6 355 CCHFV_Huh7_24h 12 0 12 6 0 6 CCHFV_Huh7_72h 559 348 907 147 61 208 CCHFV_HepG2_24h 44 1 45 20 0 20 CCHFV_HepG2_72h 121 77 198 45 8 53 EBV_differented-NOKs 237 772 1009 245 146 391 EBV_undifferented-NOKs 90 173 263 70 36 106 MV_MSC(5H) 1383 115 1498 1128 85 1213 MV_MSC(hTERT) 733 191 924 319 64 383 RSV 430 229 659 69 6 75 SARS-CoV-2_A549 32 1 33 6 0 6 SARS-CoV-2_NHBE 104 23 127 14 3 17 RHV_6h 1 0 1 2 1 3 aDifferentially expressed human gene; bdifferentially expressed HERV. Table 2. Summary of differentially expressed human genes and HERVs in each dataset.
Subsequently, we compared the DEHERVs of each dataset in pairs. As shown in Supplementary Fig. S2A, the 22 datasets were clearly divided into two clusters, where EBV and HCV groups were significantly different from the other groups, which was similar to the expression of genome-wide HERV loci (Fig. 1B). Among them, ZIKV_F (FSS13025, isolated in Brazil in 2015) and ZIKV_P (PE243, a progenitor strain isolated in Cambodia in 2010) had the highest correlation coefficient, and 279 of 282 DEHERVs in the ZIKV_P group overlapped with those in the ZIKV_F group, indicating that the induction of HERVs by different strains was highly consistent. Moreover, the Flu-A and DENV groups shared the highest number of HERVs, followed by the Flu-A and Flu-B groups. In addition, the HCV, CCHFV, and RHV groups contained RNA-seq data obtained after different hours post infection (hpi); we found that exogenous viral infections affected the expressions of HERVs in a time-dependent manner. In the early stage of infection, the expressions of a small number of HERVs and host genes were changed, and the number of DEGs and DEHERVs was observed to increase with time (Supplementary Fig. S2B, Table 2). For example, relative to the mock treated group, 0, 154, and 241 DEHERVs in HCV-infected cells were detected at 12, 36, and 72 hpi, respectively.
It was worth noting that, with the exception of the major down-regulation of human genes in the two EBV groups, the number of up-regulated HERVs and genes was higher than the number of down-regulated HERVs and genes in cells infected with these viruses. Collectively, these results indicate that exogenous viral infections could not only stimulate host genes transcription, but also induce HERV activity in human cells.
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In our previous study, we found a correlation between viral infection-induced DEHERVs and DEGs and proposed the concept of DEHERV-G pair to reveal their potential interactions (Wang et al. 2020). In this study, we detected DEHERV-G pairs in each dataset. After adjusting for redundancy, only 4299 unique pairs were left out of the 6049 DEHERV-G pairs, indicating that the results of different datasets were partially overlapped. As shown in Fig. 2A, the datasets showing the highest number of DEHERV-G pairs were (in descending order) the Flu-A, DENV-2, Flu-B, MV_MSC(5H) (5H-mesenchymal stem cells), ZIKV_F, and EBV_diff-NOKs (differentiated normal oral keratinocytes (NOKs) cells) datasets, with 2706, 830, 823, 449, 291, and 176 pairs, respectively. Other datasets had relatively lower number of DEHERV-G pairs, for example, only four pairs were detected in both A549 and NHBE cells infected with SARS-CoV-2.
Figure 2. Identification of DEHERV-G pairs in each dataset. A Number of DEHERV-G pair. B Proportion of DEHERV-G pairs in four expression patterns. Only datasets with more than 10 DEHERV-G pairs are shown.
DEHERVs and DEGs, as components of DEHERV-G pairs, were divided into those showing up-regulated and down-regulated expression; therefore, there are four modes of DEHERV-G pair expression altogether. To avoid data bias, only the datasets with more than 10 pairs of DEHERV-Gs were subsequently analyzed (Fig. 2B). Interestingly, more than 90% of DEHERV-G pairs in all datasets had a consistent expression pattern, that is, both the expressions of their components were all up-regulated or down-regulated; up-regulation of HERVs and genes was mainly dominant.
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To explore the potential key HERV loci closely related to exogenous viral infections, we compared the DEHERV-G pairs detected in all datasets to screen for common DEHERV-G pairs in multiple datasets. Considering that the results of EBV datasets were very different from those of other datasets and that groups with a low number of elements would introduce bias into the intersection analysis, we analyzed DEHERV-G pairs that are common in DENV-2, Flu-A, Flu-B, ZIKV, WNV, and MV datasets (Fig. 3A). As listed in Supplementary Table S2, a total of 43 common DEHERV-G pairs were identified, which consisted of 43 HERVs and 28 human genes, and their structure is illustrated in Supplementary Fig. S3. Notably, all of their components were significantly up regulated. In term of distribution, these DEHERV-G pairs were not randomly distributed but were concentrated on certain autosomes, such as chr1, chr4, chr12, and chr22 (Fig. 3B). Furthermore, we analyzed the distance of HERV relative to its paired human gene (Fig. 3C). We found that almost all of the common 43 HERVs were located closely to their paired genes. About half of them were located in the intron region of neighboring gene, while only 2% of them were more than 5 kb away from the neighboring gene.
Figure 3. Screening for key DEHERV-G pairs associated with viral infection. A Veen diagram of key DEHERV-G pair enriched in six datasets. The pairs constituting the intersection of all datasets are considered to be the key DEHERV-G pairs. B Distribution of the components of the 43 key DEHERV-G pairs on chromosomes. The red letter represents human gene, and the blue letter represents HERV site. C Location of DEHERV loci relative to human genes. UTR: untranslated region; TSS: transcription start site; TES: transcription end site.
In addition, we analyzed the 43 common DEHERV-G pairs in all datasets (Supplementary Fig. S4). We found that, except for the EBV and HCV groups that did not contain these pairs, all other groups contained all or some of the 43 pairs. Moreover, the longer the time after infection, the greater the number of DEHERV-G pairs identified in the cells, which was consistent with previous results on the overall DEHERVs.
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Firstly, we analyzed the features of sequence type and classification of the 43 HERVs. As shown in Fig. 4A and Supplementary Table S2, 72% of the DEHERV loci were solo-LTRs (L: 31/43), 12% contained only internal sequences (I: 5/43), and the remaining loci contained single-terminal or double-terminal LTR sequences and internal gene sequences (LI: 4/43; LIL: 3/43). According to the method reported by Kojima (Kojima 2018), the common HERVs were mainly classified into the superfamily of ERV3 and ERV1, which accounted for about 63% (27/43) and 30% (13/43) of the HERVs, respectively. Among them, 18 loci belonged to the MaLR group of the ERV3 superfamily.
Figure 4. Characteristics of the components of 43 key DEHERV-G pairs. A Count of HERVs in different categories. The height of the columns represents the number of HERVs. B PPI network of human genes. The circle represents protein-coding gene, in which the red filled represents interferon induced genes, and the triangle represents lncRNA. C GO enrichment analysis of human genes. D KEGG enrichment analysis of human genes. E Distribution of the key DEHERV-G pairs in interform-beta or ploy(I: C)-stimulated cells.
As another component, the human genes in the key DEHERV-G pairs included 3 long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and 25 protein-coding genes (Fig. 4B, Supplementary Table S2). Literature review showed that 24 of the protein-coding genes were ISGs, and the expression of the remaining one gene, phosphatase 1 regulatory subunit 15A (PPP1R15A) gene, was reported to directly contribute to the stochasticity of interferon-beta (IFN-β) synthesis (Dalet et al. 2017). Additionally, expression of AL445490.1, which is called lncRNA-IFI6, was induced by IFN and could inhibit the expression of neighboring interferon alpha inducible protein 6 (IFI6) (Liu et al. 2019). STRING analysis showed that 20 of these genes were highly correlated with each other (Fig. 4B, Supplementary Table S3).
Finally, we performed functional and pathway enrichment analysis on the human genes of the 43 DEHERV-G pairs. GO enrichment analysis showed that they were mainly enriched in biological processes related to the innate immune response to viral infections, such as response to virus, type Ⅰ interferon signaling pathway, and negative regulation of viral genome replication (adjusted P < 0.05) (Fig. 4C, Supplementary Table S4). In addition, KEGG pathway enrichment analysis showed that these genes were significantly enriched in a variety of signaling pathways related to viral infections, including Flu-A virus, HCV, MV, herpes simplex virus type 1, EBV, and hepatitis B virus (adjusted P < 0.05) (Fig. 4D, Supplementary Table S4). Furthermore, we taken corresponding analysis of transcriptomic data of IFN and ploy(I: C)-stimulated human-derived cells (accession numbers: PRJNA633674, PRJNA510831). Of all 43 key DEHERV-G pairs, 32 and 36 were found to be detected in IFN-β and ploy(I: C)-stimulated cells, respectively. Taken together, these results suggest that some HERVs are indeed closely associated with host immune response induced by viral infection and may have been integrated into the antiviral regulatory network underlying the IFN response.