Anthropic Says It Discovered a Crispr-Like System. Now What?

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company, has discovered a potential Crispr-like system in a protein called ART, which stands for array-associated reverse transcriptase. This discovery was made by running 950 Claude agents, Anthropic's AI models, through genetic databases for 21.5 hours. Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing expert, praised Anthropic for sharing the discovery, while other scientists expressed skepticism about the finding.

Anthropic has set up a wet lab for drug discovery and is clear that the discovery is just the beginning of their work. The experiment conducted by Anthropic is not peer-reviewed, and it remains unknown if ART can be used as a gene-editing tool. The discovery was made by identifying more than 200,000 possible reverse transcriptases, narrowing down the list to several thousand new candidates, and then finding an unusual reverse transcriptase family with a long region of repeat DNA sequences resembling Crispr.

Anthropic is calling this system ART, and it is found in jumbo phages, large viruses that infect bacteria. The discovery is interesting because it showcases how AI can identify patterns in large datasets that humans might miss. However, more research is needed to determine the significance of this discovery and whether it can be used as a gene-editing tool.