Additionally, autophagy genes IFI16 (Duan et al., 2011; Wichit et al., 2019; Kim et al., 2020; Jiang et al., 2021), ZC3H12A (Srivastava et al., 2020), SQSTM1 (Wu et al., 2004), WDR81 (Zhu et al., 2021), and PIK3R2 (Weisberg et al., 2020) are associated with viral infection, including SARS-CoV-1 (Wu et al., 2004; Srivastava et al., 2020) and were downregulated in this study when cells were treated with NIC. This evidence concerns the gene IFI16 and viral infectious disease.