Rare peptide anchors of HLA class I alleles contribute to the COVID-19 disease severity and T cell memory

Understanding how HLA polymorphism affects both the susceptibility and severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection will help to identify individuals at higher risk to better manage and prioritize vaccination at the clinical level and explain the differences in epidemic trends in different regions at the epidemiological level. This study compared the frequencies of HLA class I alleles (HLA-A, B) in 214 COVID-19 patients with different disease severity and 35 healthy controls and analyzed the correlations between specific HLA alleles and disease severity and T cell memory. The results showed no significant difference in HLA allele frequencies between COVID-19 patients and healthy controls (P > 0.05). The allele HLA-B*13:02 was significantly correlated with the disease severity of COVID-19 patients (P = 0.006). After adjusting the age and disease severity, the T cell responses of COVID-19 convalescents with allele HLA-B*40:01 may be lower at six months (P = 0.044) and 12 months (P = 0.069). Moreover, these results may be due to their rare peptide anchors by analyzing the binding peptide motifs of these HLA alleles. The study may be valuable for studying the potential association of specific HLA alleles with SARS-CoV-2 infection.