Claude found a new CRISPR-like enzyme system

On September 23 Anthropic announced a new life sciences research group and lab focused on fundamental biology. Its first result is a previously uncharacterised enzyme system in bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria. The company named it array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART. The system has three parts: a reverse transcriptase enzyme, a neighbouring partner gene and an array of evenly spaced DNA repeats. The repeat layout resembles the arrays in CRISPR systems.

The search ran for 21 hours with 950 Claude agents and used 210 million tokens. The agents gathered more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, identified 3,500 new candidate systems and narrowed them to the 20 most compelling. Anthropic says this kind of survey usually takes expert scientists weeks to months. The central enzyme was already known; Claude was the first to spot that the enzyme, the partner gene and the repeat array form a system together.

The work is out as a preprint and has not been peer reviewed. Researchers do not yet know what ART actually does. Feng Zhang, a CRISPR pioneer at MIT and the Broad Institute, reviewed the findings and called them an exciting example of how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery.