Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
Anthropic says Claude found a novel phage enzyme system with CRISPR-like DNA repeats.
Anthropic said a new Bay Area life-sciences group uses Claude to search DNA datasets and propose hypotheses that human scientists test at BSL-1 and BSL-2. After about 21 hours, roughly 950 agents and 210 million tokens, Claude identified array-associated reverse transcriptases in bacteriophages: a reverse transcriptase next to non-coding DNA repeats and an accessory protein. Anthropic published a preprint and said the system's function is still unknown. CRISPR researcher Feng Zhang called the RNA-repeat association intriguing and worth further study.
- Anthropic opened a Bay Area lab pairing Claude with human experiments.
- About 950 agents searched DNA data for 21 hours.
- Claude flagged phage reverse transcriptases beside DNA repeat arrays.
- The ART system is uncharacterized; work stayed at BSL-1 and BSL-2.
- Anthropic released a preprint; Feng Zhang called the finding intriguing.
- Organizations
- AnthropicMITBroad Institute
- AI models
- Claude
From the original article
7 min read at anthropic.com
We’re introducing a new life sciences research group and laboratory at Anthropic. Our focus is on fundamental biology research using Claude: exploring datasets of DNA to identify uncharacterized protein families, generating hypotheses at scale, and testing them through experiments in the lab.
By raahelb · anthropic.com
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