🧬 Claude helped describe an enzyme system with DNA repeats similar to CRISPR
About 950 Claude Code agents scanned over 200,000 reverse transcriptases from metagenomic databases in 21 hours and 210 million tokens, selecting 20 systems. One agent noticed an array of ~200-nucleotide repeats and a partner gene near the enzyme gene — a new ART family in giant phages.
🌍 Traditional genomic mining only sees pre-defined features; the Claude agent noticed repeats outside of them and prepared a report. Humans conducted the laboratory verification. Curation that would have taken weeks was completed in 21 hours.
👤 The function of ART is unknown, but its structure resembles a CRISPR 'card catalog' of short RNAs. If ART works the same way, it could be a new programmable mechanism for DNA, but this is a hypothesis. The Anthropic post and preprint are open.
Source 1: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-discovers-novel-enzyme-system Source 2: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/22573675ada52a8ca8a97a1a4b4326b2f208a071.pdf