crispr

On Wednesday local time, Anthropic announced that its model Claude identified a previously undescribed enzyme system in vast DNA sequence data, with a repetitive sequence arrangement similar to CRISPR. This is the first achievement of its newly established biological laboratory, which was formed this spring and is located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Following the announcement, shares of gene editing companies fell on Wednesday, with CRISPR Therapeutics down 5.54%, Beam Therapeutics down 6.02%, and Prime Medicine down 11.58%.The related task was to search for noteworthy reverse transcriptase systems from large DNA databases. During approximately 21 hours of searching, about 950 Claude agents used around 210 million tokens, with one agent noticing a repetitive DNA sequence arranged near a certain reverse transcriptase gene. The team named this combination the array-associated reverse transcriptase system, primarily found in bacteriophages, which includes reverse transcriptase genes, adjacent accompanying genes, and a set of repetitive DNA sequences. The reverse transcriptase itself has been studied before, and the new finding is that it forms a system together with surrounding non-coding DNA sequences and functionally unknown accompanying proteins.Anthropic stated that researchers still do not know the main function of this system and have not proven that it can perform targeted modifications to DNA like mature gene editing tools. Preliminary experiments found that these repetitive sequences can produce various short RNAs, but this does not equate to having programmable gene editing capabilities. The preprint paper disclosed that to verify whether the discovery could be repeated, the team ran the same search 10 more times;