Among 2,654 mature entries of Homo sapiens in miRBase Release 22.1, 479 of them could target SARS-CoV-2 genes (Supplemental Files-human to virus). While Envelope and ORF6 genes were targeted by single miRNAs, ORF1ab appeared to be the target of 369 different human mature miRNAs (Table 2).
From our rigorous analysis pipeline, which covers three different well-established algorithms (IntaRNA, miRanda, and psRNATarget) to predict RNA-RNA interactions, we have identified 122 and 106 host antiviral miRNAs against SARS-CoV (R) and SARS-CoV-2 (R), respectively (Figures 2A,B, Supplementary File 2).
We identified 1,018 miRNAs to target SARS-CoV-2 genes, among which 98 miRNAs are predicted to target SARS-CoV-2 genes uniquely when compared with other viruses studied here (Supplementary Table S6).