Anthropic’s biolab made a discovery it’s comparing to Crispr

📰 Anthropic’s biolab made a discovery it’s comparing to Crispr Anthropic says its AI Claude has "autonomously discovered" a new enzyme system similar to machinery behind the powerful gene-editing tool Crispr. It's the first result from Anthropic's newly-launch... 📰 Source: The Verge 🔗 Link: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/999470/anthropic-biolab-claude-crispr # AI # ArtificialIntelligence

Anthropic’s new wet lab has achieved its first scientific result. Nearly 950 Claude agents operated simultaneously for 21 hours, analyzing an extensive dataset. During the process, one agent detected a recurring DNA sequence. Further investigation and laboratory validation led to the identification of a previously uncharacterized enzyme system within bacteriophages. According to company representatives, the project consumed 210 million tokens of compute. The discovery marks an early milestone for Anthropic's wet-lab efforts in automated scientific research. 📰 @aipost

🤖 Claude Discovered a System Resembling CRISPR Claude autonomously discovered a novel enzyme system with an array of DNA repeats, similar to CRISPR—a bacterial immune mechanism that scientists use as "scissors" for genome editing. This is the first result from Anthropic's new biolab, where humans test AI hypotheses experimentally. 🔍 Scientists tasked Claude with finding unusual reverse transcriptases—enzymes that copy genetic information from RNA to DNA. The AI agents independently analyzed the sequences and searched for anomalies that might fall outside previously known criteria. Over 21 hours, approximately 950 AI agents used 210 million tokens and identified 3,500 potentially new systems, narrowing the list to the 20 most promising candidates. One agent drew attention to a "spectacular" array of repetitive sequences near the reverse transcriptase gene in the genomes of bacteriophages (viruses that attack bacteria). Previous studies had identified the enzyme itself, but no one had noticed the repeats and the adjacent gene with an unknown function. Anthropic notes that the set of features they found had previously been observed in only a few systems, including CRISPR, and all of t