Claude just found a CRISPR-like DNA pattern, but even Anthropic's scientists aren't sure what it does
The large language model took less than a day to identify the curious stretch of DNA
Claude, Anthropic’s large language model, has identified a peculiar stretch of DNA in a bacteriophage virus that bears a resemblance to CRISPR, a gene-editing tool. Anthropic’s scientists are unsure of the DNA’s function, but they note that it sits next to a gene for a reverse transcriptase enzyme, an enzyme that converts RNA into DNA.
Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic’s head of life sciences, and Nicholas Perry, a researcher, describe Claude’s discovery as displaying the intuition and persistence of a real biologist. However, they emphasize that Claude is not a replacement for biologists. Kauderer-Abrams and Perry shared how they utilized Claude to search for patterns in DNA and what they hoped to find.
They aimed to accelerate basic science and disease-curing efforts by discovering and scaling up new tools found in nature. The training data for Claude included extensive knowledge of biology, covering bioinformatics, structural biology, and organic chemistry. The prompt given to Claude involved searching for patterns associated with reverse transcriptase enzymes, specifically looking for accessory proteins.
Claude discovered an array of repeats in noncoding RNA, which led to the identification of the DNA pattern. The DNA in question is found in jumbo phages, a type of bacteriophage with very large genomes. These genes have the ability to spread widely, which is a remarkable aspect of this field. While AI models like Claude can be energy-intensive, their computational requirements for this analysis were relatively low, making it accessible to labs interested in such research.
Written by urgent.news from Scientific American's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
