Fig. 2: Enhanced viral sensing in children’s epithelial cells.
a, Schematic representation of epithelial response to SARS-CoV-2 infection including genes involved in virus sensing and subsequent IFN response; created with BioRender.com. b, Dot plots depicting the expression of virus-sensing genes in epithelial cells of children and adults. Each significant increase comparing SARS-CoV-2-negative children (n = 18) with SARS-CoV-2-negative adults (n = 23), and SARS-CoV-2-positive children during the early (days post-onset of symptoms (dps) ≤ 4, n = 11) or late infection phase (dps 5–12, n = 11) with SARS-CoV-2-positive adults amid the early (n = 13) or late (n = 8) infection phase, respectively, is marked by a red circle (Benjamini–Hochberg-adjusted two-tailed, Wilcoxon P < 0.05). Ave. exp., average gene expression; Pct. exp., percentage of cells expressing the gene. c, Violin plots showing expression of prototypical virus-sensing genes in epithelial cells of SARS-CoV-2-positive patients (n = 45) in relation to days after first symptoms. d, Heat map showing scaled expression of 171 representative ISGs in all epithelial cells during the early SARS-CoV-2 infection phase (dps ≤ 4). Only selected genes are annotated; for a completely annotated heat map, see Extended Data Fig. 3. e, Differential expression of selected ISGs in an in vitro model comparing the response to SARS-CoV-2 infection in MDA5 (encoded by IFIH1)-overexpressing A549ACE2 cells and empty vector controls. n = 3 biologically independent replicates; error bars show mean ± s.e.m.; *P < 0.05, ***P<0.001 (IFNB1, 5.47 × 10−4; MX1, 2.63 × 10−2; BST2, 8.74 × 10−4; RSAD2, 4.24 × 10−2; IFIT1, 1.30 × 10−2) from one-tailed Student t-test.
