HuCoPIA: An Atlas of Human vs. SARS-CoV-2 Interactome and the Comparative Analysis with Other Coronaviridae Family Viruses

SARS-CoV-2, a novel betacoronavirus strain, has caused a pandemic that has claimed the lives of nearly 6.7M people worldwide. Vaccines and medicines are being developed around the world to reduce the disease spread, fatality rates, and control the new variants. Understanding the protein-protein interaction mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 in humans, and their comparison with the previous SARS-CoV and MERS strains, is crucial for these efforts. These interactions might be used to assess vaccination effectiveness, diagnose exposure, and produce effective biotherapeutics. Here, we present the HuCoPIA database, which contains approximately 100,000 protein-protein interactions between humans and three strains (SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV, and MERS) of betacoronavirus. The interactions in the database are divided into common interactions between all three strains and those unique to each strain. It also contains relevant functional annotation information of human proteins. The HuCoPIA database contains SARS-CoV-2 (41,173), SARS-CoV (31,997), and MERS (26,862) interactions, with functional annotation of human proteins like subcellular localization, tissue-expression, KEGG pathways, and Gene ontology information. We believe HuCoPIA will serve as an invaluable resource to diverse experimental biologists, and will help to advance the research in better understanding the mechanism of betacoronaviruses.