Anthropic’s Claude identifies novel biological system with CRISPR like features

Anthropic says Claude autonomously identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system with features resembling CRISPR, marking an early result from the company’s new life sciences research lab. CRISPR is a biological system found in bacteria that scientists adapted into a tool for precisely editing DNA. It has become a foundation for modern gene editing research and medicines. The system, called array associated reverse transcriptases, or ART, is mainly found in bacteriophages and combines a reverse transcriptase, a partner gene and a long array of evenly spaced DNA repeats. Anthropic said the repeat structure resembles the arrays that help make CRISPR systems programmable. Claude was given a high level prompt to search a large DNA sequence database for unusual reverse transcriptases. Roughly 950 agents spent 21 hours and used about 210 million tokens searching the data before one identified the repeating DNA pattern. The agents collected more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, identified 3,500 candidate systems and narrowed them to 20 for deeper analysis. Anthropic said work of that scale could take an expert scientist weeks or months. The underlying reverse transcriptase had...