Sosuke Kakee, Kyosuke Kanai, Akeno Tsuneki-Tokunaga, Keisuke Okuno, Noriyuki Namba, Katsuyuki Tomita, Hiroki Chikumi, Seiji Kageyama
Abstract
It has been postulated from a combination of evidence that a sudden increase in COVID-19 cases among pediatric patients after onset of the Omicron wave was attributed to a reduced requirement for TMPRSS2-mediated entry in pediatric airways with lower expression levels of TMPRSS2.
Introduction
Since COVID-19 was recognized at the end of the year 2019 [1], it spread globally within several months and became a pandemic [2]. Although the pandemic continued with the periodic emergence of new variants, it has become endemic in 2023.
Materials and Methods
The present study was approved by the Institutional Review Board represented by the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Tottori University.
Result
Delta variants were isolated from nine adults, but none were obtained from pediatric patients because of extreme rarity of infections in this population. Omicron variants were isolated from 38 adults and 22 from pediatric patients (Table 1).
Discussion
Nucleotide sequences of SARS-CoV-2 genes showed extremely high homology (more than 99.5%) with the reference strains. Although Delta variants were produced at significantly higher levels from Vero cells in the presence of TMPRSS2 in vitro, Omicron variants proliferated equally in TMPRSS2-postive and -negative cell cultures.
Conclusion
The available epidemiological evidence strengthen that the TMPRSS2-dependency of SARS-CoV-2 variants is one of the most crucial determinants influencing the COVID-19 epidemic size among children.
Citation: Kakee S, Kanai K, Tsuneki-Tokunaga A, Okuno K, Namba N, Tomita K, et al. (2024) Difference in TMPRSS2 usage by Delta and Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2: Implication for a sudden increase among children. PLoS ONE 19(6): e0299445. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299445
Editor: Huseyin Tombuloglu, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, SAUDI ARABIA
Received: February 11, 2024; Accepted: May 7, 2024; Published: June 13, 2024
Copyright: © 2024 Kakee et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting information files.
Funding: This work was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Infection Control and Prevention by the International Platform for Dryland Research and Education, Tottori University. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Source: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0299445#abstract0
