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Scientists have identified more than 2,000 human genes linked to COVID-19, yet the bulk of the published literature is dominated by only a small subset of them, a fact that may be limiting progress in the fight against the pandemic.
A team at Northwestern University, led by data scientist Thomas Stoeger, had previously shown that scientists tend to focus on a handful of genes—specifically, less than 20 percent of all genes in the human genome accounted for more than 90 percent of the publications they analyzed. Prior to the Human Genome Project, scientists had an incomplete view of the full suite of human genes and relied more heavily on those that had analogs in model organisms or were easier to study using knockout experiments. The advent of modern sequencing technology—including complementary tools such as CRISPR, mass spectrometry, and RNA-based approaches—has broadened what researchers know, but it ...
