Claude finds an unknown CRISPR-like enzyme system in bacteriophages
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
SI is already spotting patterns in mountains of genomic data that humans missed; if the function is confirmed, the search for new tools for medicine and gene editing will speed up markedly.
Anthropic published a preprint: about 950 Claude agents, in 21 hours and 210 million tokens, collected more than 200 thousand reverse transcriptases, singled out about 3,500 candidate systems and narrowed them to the 20 most interesting. They found the ART system: a reverse transcriptase, a neighboring protein and a long array of DNA repeats resembling a CRISPR array. Lab experiments confirmed that the array produces short RNAs; the system's function is unknown, and all lab work was done by humans. Feng Zhang called the link between the transcriptase and RNA repeats "truly intriguing." The result so far exists only in Anthropic's preprint, without peer review.
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