A bibliometric mapping of advancements and trends in genome editing in pigs

Abstract

Targeted genome editing in pigs for optimizing pig productivity, disease tolerance and biomedical research has been widely undertaken by researchers. The present study aims to investigate the research advancements, focus area, gaps and challenges in the field of genome editing in pigs using bibliometric analysis. Bibliographic information of publications on genome editing in pigs from 2010 to 2023 were retrieved from Scopus database. Bibliometric analysis for parameters and network visualization like co-authorship, keyword co-occurrence, citation, bibliographic coupling and co-citation was conducted using VOSviewer. Literature mining was conducted to evaluate the emerging areas and challenges in the development of gene edited pigs. We found 727 documents on genome editing in pigs, of which 407 were research articles, authored by 2826 researchers from 1359 research organizations across 40 countries. The two countries China and United States, account for more than 50% of the research publications. Investigations on optimization of procedure, delivery methods, editing efficiency, reducing off-target dominated the early phase of research, which shifted to its application for generating knock out (KO) or knock in (KI) pigs in the recent years. Areas like xenotransplantation, disease resistance, higher muscling and disease model have dominated the research horizon. Emerging areas include base editing, CRISPR based screens, diagnostics and therapeutics. Investigations on reducing heat stress and environmental footprints through genetic alterations need more attention of scientists. The challenges like off-target effect, regulatory, ethical and societal issues for channelizing gene edited pigs from lab-to-land and then from farm-to-fork continue to restrain this field.