Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
Anthropic
Anthropic's new life sciences lab reports that Claude agents, run as ~950 parallel agents over 21 hours, narrowed 200,000+ reverse transcriptases to 20 candidates and identified a previously unknown phage enzyme system, array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART), whose repeat array is expressed as distinct short RNAs. Human scientists verified the finding in wet-lab experiments and posted a preprint; CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang called it "genuinely intriguing".
Why it matters
A concrete case of AI agents autonomously driving genomics discovery rather than only summarizing results.
Importance: 4/5
Frontier-lab research result with autonomous agent-driven scientific discovery, official announcement