Anthropic has introduced a new life sciences research group and laboratory, describing its focus as fundamental biology research conducted with Claude: mining DNA datasets to identify uncharacterized protein families, generating hypotheses at scale, and testing them experimentally in the lab.
In early results shared by the company, Claude agents were given a single high-level prompt to search a large DNA sequence database for interesting new examples of reverse transcriptases (RTs), enzymes that copy RNA into DNA. According to Anthropic, roughly 950 agents spent 21 hours and 210 million tokens on the search. One agent flagged a repeating pattern of DNA sequences next to the gene for an unusual RT.
After further analysis and laboratory testing, the team concluded the pattern marked a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophages, which they call array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART). Anthropic says the underlying RT had been identified in earlier studies, but that Claude appears to be the first to notice the system's defining features: an associated array of non-coding DNA sequences and an additional accessory protein of unknown function.
ART consists of three parts, according to the company: the RT, a partner gene beside it, and a long array of evenly spaced DNA repeats whose layout resembles a CRISPR array. Anthropic says its first experiments show the ART array is expressed as a set of distinct short RNAs, suggesting something analogous may be at play, though the system's function remains unknown.
Anthropic said its agents gathered over 200,000 RTs, selected 3,500 new candidate systems, and narrowed them to the 20 most compelling for human-readable reports — work it says could take an expert scientist weeks to months. The lab work, the company added, is performed entirely by human scientists at BSL-1 and BSL-2 levels, and a pre-print has been released.