Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
About 950 Claude agents, in 21 hours and 210 million tokens, flagged a previously uncharacterized reverse-transcriptase system with CRISPR-like DNA repeats.
Announced with a new Anthropic life-sciences lab. Claude searched sequence databases for reverse transcriptases and spotted an array of non-coding repeats beside one phage enzyme; Anthropic's wet lab then confirmed it as a new 'array-associated reverse transcriptase' family. Its function is still unknown.
- Date
- Wednesday, 23 September 2026
- Lab
- Anthropic
- Kind
- paper
- Access
- paper only
Figures
| Measure | Value | Measured by |
|---|---|---|
| Search effort | about 950 agents, 21 hours, 210 million tokens humans supplied only the prompt and the lab work | company |
Preprint, not peer reviewed; MIT/Broad's Feng Zhang called it 'intriguing' and worth further study. 'First to notice' is Anthropic's claim.
Sources
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