Anthropic's artificial intelligence model Claude, during autonomous analysis of genetic data, discovered a previously unknown enzyme system in the DNA of bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria. This is reported by infohub.kz.
The new system has been named array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART. Its key feature is the presence of repetitive DNA fragments adjacent to the enzyme gene, which structurally resembles the famous CRISPR genome-editing technology.
The experiment involved about 950 AI agents that autonomously searched a database of 1.9 billion protein clusters for 21.5 hours without direct human intervention. Afterwards, company scientists conducted laboratory tests and confirmed the existence of the discovered structure.
Despite the uniqueness of the discovery, experts and the developers themselves emphasize that the exact functions of the ART system have not yet been established. It is currently unknown whether it can be used for targeted gene editing like CRISPR.
Molecular biologist Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard noted that the discovery of such structures is of great interest to science and demonstrates the high potential of AI agents in biological research.