Evaluation of studies on molecular biology and genetics related to COVID-19 with data mining

Abstract

Aim: The aim of this study was to examine the most common studies about molecular biology and genetics related to COVID-19. In addition, the aim was also to determine the subject focus of studies about COVID-19 during the pandemic with data mining. Material and Method: Review and research articles, book chapters, conference abstracts, case reports and mini reviews published between March 2020 and July 2021 were included in this study. We retrieved only articles from the genetics discipline. The MeSH heading “genetics [GENET]” was used including the specific fields in the MeSH hierarchy of cytogenetics, genomics, human genetics, immunogenetics, molecular biology, pharmacogenetics, phenomics, radiation genetics, toxicogenetics, gene ontology, microbial genetics, behavioral and population genetics. Results: A total of 6234 research articles were evaluated in our study. Of the 85966 terms, 5833 met the threshold from title and abstract extraction. We showed that betacoronavirus, viral pneumonia, viral RNA, spike glycoprotein, coronavirus, middle-aged and animals were the most repetitive terms. Clinical laboratory techniques, polymerase chain reaction and reverse transcriptase polymerase techniques were the main focus for the detection of COVID-19. We found that molecular-based COVID-19 studies were most frequently published by the Journal of Medical Virology, Viruses, and PLoS One. We found that the institutes where molecular-based studies investigating COVID-19 were conducted are in the United States (USA), China and England. The USA and China were in the first rank for countries that conducted the most frequent molecular-based COVID-19 studies, and Turkey was in 19th place in terms of published molecular COVID-19 studies. Conclusion: It is important to identify the issues and mechanisms most frequently investigated in molecular-based studies related to COVID-19. Scientific approaches founded on evidence-based data may be beneficial to find the curative treatment for COVID-19 infection and to effectively prevent this infection.

Keywords

• COVID-19
• genetics
• molecular biology
• data mining

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