Did you survive Covid? Maybe you can thank your Neanderthal ancestors

By Maggie Fox, CNN

People who survive a bout of Covid-19 with mild symptoms or even no symptoms may be able to thank their Neanderthal ancestors, a new study suggests.

Researchers found a genetic mutation that reduces the risk of severe Covid-19 infection by about 22%. It was found in all the samples they took of Neanderthal DNA, and in about 30% of samples from people of European and Asian origin.

The genetic region involved affects the body's immune response to RNA viruses such as the coronavirus, as well as West Nile virus and hepatitis C virus, the researchers reported Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This region encodes proteins that activate enzymes that are important during infections with RNA viruses,” they wrote.

It may be one of those mutations that has been passed down over the millennia because it helped people survive, Svante Paabo and Hugo Zeberg of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany reported.

The finding could help explain why Black patients are so much more likely to suffer severe coronavirus disease. Neanderthals, who went extinct about 40,000 years ago, lived alongside and sometimes interbred with modern humans in Europe and Asia but not in Africa, and people of purely African descent do not carry Neanderthal DNA. Studies estimate that about 2% of DNA in people of European and Asian descent can be traced back to Neanderthals.

Disponível em: https://edition.cnn.com. Acesso em: 24 fev. 2021.

O texto apresenta um estudo que mostra que pode haver alguma relação entre a sobrevivência à covid e a ancestralidade do Homem de Neandertal. Tal possibilidade ocorre devido a uma mudança genética que