Introduction
Last week, Anthropic, a leading AI company, announced that its large language model Claude had identified an enzyme system with properties that are “reminiscent of CRISPR,” the Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing tool. This discovery has sparked a mix of excitement and skepticism among the scientific community. In this article, we will explore the details of this discovery, its implications, and the ongoing debate surrounding it.
The Discovery
According to Anthropic, about 950 Claude agents running simultaneously found the interesting genetic sequences in 21.5 hours. The discovery was made possible by Claude’s search through vast genomic databases for “interesting new examples” of reverse transcriptases, proteins that copy RNA into DNA. This is the opposite of the normal process in our cells, where DNA is transcribed into RNA, but is used by other organisms in a variety of biological functions, including inserting segments of DNA.
Claude's Role
Claude agents initially identified more than 200,000 possible reverse transcriptases, and after picking out several thousand that appeared to be new, narrowed the scope even further, eventually finding an “unusual” reverse transcriptase family containing a long region of repeat DNA sequences that resemble CRISPR. Anthropic is calling this system ART, short for array-associated reverse transcriptases. The system is found in jumbo phages, large viruses that infect bacteria.
Expert Opinions
Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing expert at the University of California, Berkeley, and director for therapeutic R&D at its Innovative Genomics Institute, expressed his compliment to Anthropic for sharing the discovery. However, other scientists are less enthusiastic about the finding, which is the first to come out of a research group formed by Anthropic earlier this year. Le Cong, a professor at Stanford University focused on integrating AI into genome engineering research, noted that the experiments are still in the queue, and the PR is already live.
The CRISPR Comparison
The discovery has been compared to CRISPR, a Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing tool. Seth Shipman, associate investigator at the Gladstone Institutes, doesn’t think what Anthropic found is a new CRISPR system, but says the discovery is still interesting. “The novel thing is how they found it, not what it is,” he says. His lab has used retrons to make gene-editing systems, so it is possible to use retrons in this way. Identifying new reverse transcriptases can take months of mining genome databases manually, so Shipman says the fact that Anthropic was able to do this in a day is impressive. But he cautions against attributing the discovery entirely to an AI model. “I think we have to be careful about saying that Claude autonomously discovered something, because there are scientists involved in the study,” he says.
The Limits of the Discovery
The discovery of the ART system is exciting, but the potential applications and significance remain unclear. The system is found in jumbo phages, large viruses that infect bacteria, and it remains unknown whether this enzyme system can be used as a gene-editing tool and, if so, whether it’s a useful gene-editing tool. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei muses that eventually Claude could autonomously perform the experiments by controlling lab equipment. However, this is still in the distant future, and questions about safety and oversight remain.
The Future of Gene Editing
The limits of Anthropic’s finding also point to a more fundamental issue. What made CRISPR revolutionary was that scientists identified a biological system that was previously unknown. It remains to be seen whether any AI model is capable of finding something useful without knowing exactly what it’s looking for. If you have an AI that only trained on knowledge from before people ever discovered CRISPR, and that AI actually discovered CRISPR, that seems to be a better setup to test an AI scientist.
Conclusion
Anthropic’s discovery of the ART system is a significant step forward in the field of gene editing. However, the potential applications and significance of this discovery remain unclear, and more research is needed to determine its potential impact. The discovery of new gene-editing systems is a promising area of research, and it will be interesting to see how this technology develops in the future.
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