Anthropic’s Claude has identified an enzyme system previously unknown to science, prompting fresh discussion about the role of artificial intelligence in biological research. The AI flagged a CRISPR-like enzyme while analysing roughly 200,000 reverse transcriptase samples, a task that would ordinarily take human researchers months to complete.
According to Anthropic, human involvement was limited to writing the prompts and carrying out the laboratory work, while 950 AI agents searched publicly available databases to identify something unique. The enzyme was spotted in around 21 hours, after which human scientists confirmed it to be a novel enzyme, meaning it had never previously been observed by science.
Feng Zhang, professor at MIT and the Broad Institute, described the work as an exciting example of how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery, adding that the identification of RNA-repeat arrays associated with reverse transcriptases is genuinely intriguing and merits further investigation.
Understanding CRISPR
CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is a defence system found in bacteria, used to fight off viral infections. When a bacterium survives a viral infection, it copies a snippet of that virus’s DNA into its own genome, building up a library of snippets across generations. When a virus attacks, the bacterium summons an RNA carrying the appropriate viral snippet. That RNA guides a cutting protein to slice the viral DNA in precisely the right places, preventing it from replicating and ending the infection. CRISPR describes this entire process from start to finish.
Researchers discovered CRISPR in 1987 and later established that the system could be applied in gene therapies, removing harmful or mutated DNA in living organisms and replacing it with clean, non-mutated DNA. It took close to 40 years for the approach to reach patients: the first CRISPR medicine was approved in the UK in 2023, followed by approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2024.
The Role of Reverse Transcriptase
A reverse transcriptase is an enzyme found in some organisms that uses RNA as a template to build DNA. This reverses the usual process, in which DNA serves as the template to build RNA, which is why it carries its own name and classification.
It is a defining characteristic of many viruses, including HIV. The discovery that HIV uses a reverse transcriptase enzyme to replicate helped scientists develop some of the earliest treatments for the virus, and that knowledge continues to inform modern therapies that have contributed to HIV no longer being a death sentence.
The enzyme system identified by Claude sits at the intersection of these two areas of research, pairing reverse transcriptase activity with CRISPR-like structures. Human scientists have confirmed the find as a novel enzyme, and further investigation is now required to establish its potential applications.
