Claude identifies enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

Anthropic said Claude identified a previously uncharacterised enzyme system in bacteriophages after searching more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases. The system was called array-associated reverse transcriptase, or ART, and Anthropic said it joined a reverse transcriptase, a neighbouring gene and a long repeat array.

Anthropic said the search was part of its life sciences research programme. It said about 950 agents spent 21 hours on the work, using around 210 million tokens, and that the process produced thousands of candidates before narrowing them to 20 detailed reports.

One Claude agent focused on an unusual reverse transcriptase family and examined the surrounding DNA. Anthropic said it detected a tandem repeat array, counted the repeats, measured their spacing, compared the pattern with known systems and searched the literature before flagging the sequence for review.

Anthropic said earlier studies had already identified the reverse transcriptase in a jumbo phage, but that the broader system and the extra protein had not been recognised before. Initial laboratory experiments found that the repeat array was expressed as multiple distinct short RNAs, while the function of ART remained unknown.

Anthropic said the work was still at an early stage and that further experiments were under way. Feng Zhang, a professor at MIT and the Broad Institute, said the finding was intriguing and deserved more investigation, and Anthropic said it had set up a Bay Area molecular biology laboratory to test candidates from computational searches.