- Anthropic used its Claude AI to find an enzyme system in viruses that infect bacteria.
- Part of the system looks a bit like the gene-editing tool CRISPR.
- Some outside scientists doubt it's a new kind of CRISPR.
- Nobody knows yet what the system does, and lab tests continue.
Anthropic used its Claude AI to find an enzyme system, which it calls ART, in viruses that infect bacteria. Part of it looks a bit like CRISPR, the tool scientists use to edit genes. Anthropic shared the find on September 23, but some outside scientists doubt it's a new kind of CRISPR. Nobody knows yet what ART does, and lab tests continue.
Anthropic announcement of enzyme find
ART has three parts. One is an enzyme, which speeds up chemical reactions inside cells. Another is a partner protein whose job is unknown. The third is a stretch of DNA where one short pattern repeats over and over, and those repeats are the part that looks like CRISPR.
ART's enzyme is a reverse transcriptase. Cells normally make RNA, a chemical cousin of DNA, by copying DNA, but these enzymes copy RNA into DNA instead. In nature, cells copy CRISPR's stretch of repeats into RNA and cut it into short pieces that steer CRISPR to its target. Anthropic's first lab test suggests ART's repeats also give rise to several short RNA pieces, but nobody has shown what those pieces do.
Anthropic says about 950 separate Claude sessions searched a DNA database over about 21 hours. They found about 200,000 groups of related enzyme sequences and wrote 19 reports on the best leads, and most of those leads didn't hold up. Claude picked which leads to chase, and scientists set the topic, guided later checks and did the lab work. Anthropic's paper on all this hasn't had formal peer review.
Anthropic preprint on ART enzymes
Anthropic says only a handful of known systems share ART's mix of parts, and all of them can cut, copy and paste DNA. But its own paper says ART's repeats differ from CRISPR's, and the genes CRISPR needs aren't nearby. It says ART may be more like a retron, a system bacteria use to fight viruses, which also uses an enzyme that copies RNA into DNA.
Jason Gill of Texas A&M and colleagues described ART's enzyme in 2021, but Anthropic says Claude appears to be first to spot its repeats. Seth Shipman of the Gladstone Institutes doesn't think ART is a new CRISPR, but finds it interesting and the one-day search impressive. Lucas Harrington, cofounder of CRISPR company Mammoth Biosciences, says the hard part is learning what a system does.
Wired on scientists' doubts, Decoder on Harrington criticism
