Claude itself has autonomously discovered an enzyme hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages that sits beside a «long array of repeating DNA,» that could work in a similar way to CRISPR — todays most common DNA-editing tool, and a discovery that won the Nobel Prize.
Claude found the enzyme almost entirely on its own, searching through a massive database of DNA sequences for interesting candidates from a human prompt. It took 21 hours, 950 agents and 210 million tokens until an agent made the discovery of repeating DNA sequences. It was then analyzed and tested by scientists in the lab.
Anthropic cautions that they don’t really know if they have stumbled on a gene-editing function, saying that «we don’t yet understand what this system does,» but says all the known systems with these properties can cut, copy and paste DNA.
It will take «much more work» to learn what the system does, Anthropic says.
Feng Zhang, a CRISPR pioneer and MIT professor says the finding is encouraging:
— This is an exciting example of how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery. The identification of RNA-repeat arrays associated with reverse transcriptases is genuinely intriguing and merits further investigation. I hope this work encourages more scientists to explore how AI can support their research.
Career biotech scientists working with Claude might establish new ways of doing biology research, Anthropic says, but they do not handle pathogens. They work mostly with «computational approaches to systematically read DNA» and pick out biological systems for further review and testing, with Claude helping to interpret the results — compressing work that would take weeks to months into a single day.
— Further experiments are underway to determine how [this DNA] works, and we are sharing these early findings to show the community that Claude can autonomously detect anomalies and drive analyses to initiate biological discoveries, Anthropic says.
Read more: Anthropic’s presentation and Dario Amodei on the future of biology. More on Reuters, The Verge, and TechCrunch. Discussion on r/Singularity and Hacker News.