Anthropic has announced a new life sciences research group dedicated to using Claude to identify uncharacterized protein families and test hypotheses through laboratory experiments. In early results, the AI autonomously discovered a novel enzyme system called array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART) found in bacteriophages.
- ART consists of a reverse transcriptase, an accessory partner gene, and a long array of evenly spaced DNA repeats resembling CRISPR arrays.
- The discovery was made after 21 hours of processing by roughly 950 agents using 210 million tokens to search a massive DNA database.
- Claude identified the system by spotting the repeating pattern next to an odd-looking reverse transcriptase gene and generating a human-readable report.
- Initial experiments show the ART array is expressed as distinct short RNAs, suggesting functionality similar to CRISPR systems.
The authors consider this significant because it demonstrates that AI agents can autonomously detect anomalies in genomic data and drive biological discoveries without detailed human direction.