THE SEARCH FOR AN ASSOCIATION OF HLA ALLELES AND COVID-19 RELATED MORTALITY IN THE RUSSIAN POPULATION

Abstract

HLA genes play a pivotal role in an immune response via the presentation of pathogen peptides in a complex on the surface of cells of a host organism. Here, we studied the association of class I and class II genes with the severity of COVID-19 infection and HLA allele variants. We performed high-resolution sequencing of class I and class II HLA genes using the sample population of 147 patients who died of COVID-19 and statistically compared our results with the frequencies of the HLA genotypes in a control population of 270 samples. The obtained data demonstrated that 51:05 and 15:18 alleles from locus B* are statistically significantly associated with COVID-19 severity, while C*14:02 allele correlates with the probability of death from COVID-19 for patients without comorbidities.