Tracking and Mapping the Use of CRISPR-Cas Systems for Research in China.

Scientists have floated the idea of a "Sputnik 2.0" technological race between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the United States of America in CRISPR-based genome editing research. This quantitative analysis of articles published between 2010 and 2020 shows that research centers based in the PRC have succeeded in making CRISPR-based genome editing a standard tool. A corpus of 18,863 academic documents containing the acronym CRISPR in their abstract shows that although PRC-based research institutions were slower to start publishing on CRISPR, they have now outpaced the publication rate of institutions located in the European Union (EU). While U.S.-based institutions have kept their leading position in basic research, PRC-based research has become momentous in agriculture-related fields. This corpus hence illustrates how deeply the international landscape of life sciences research has shifted since the Human Genome Project, mostly to the PRC's advantage.