CRISPR-Cas is a gene-editing technology that uses programmable enzymes to cut and modify DNA, widely used in research, medicine, and biotechnology.
Anthropic says Claude found a CRISPR-like repeat array beside a reverse transcriptase gene in a bacteriophage, function unknown. The company's researchers say they have no idea yet what it does, so the finding is a lead for lab validation.
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Columbia researchers report DRT10, a bacterial antiviral system whose reverse transcriptase writes repeat DNA by a route that parallels human telomerase. The Nature abstract reports bacterial biochemistry, structures and phylogenetics, and Sternberg calls the editing and telomere-repair uses early days.
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Copenhagen PhD candidate Mario Rodríguez Mestre questions whether Anthropic's Claude independently found an enzyme family his team has studied since 2022. Credit for the find is unsettled, and the case shows how little a scientist can check once unpublished work has gone into a commercial chatbot.
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Anthropic says about 950 Claude agents found an enzyme system reminiscent of Crispr in 21.5 hours, backed so far by one unreviewed lab experiment. Scientists credit the speed of the search, so a lab can budget for faster triage today while the bench works out what the enzyme does.
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Anthropic ran about 950 Claude agents for 21 hours on 210 million tokens to cut over 200,000 reverse transcriptases to 20 lab candidates. Human scientists kept the bench work, so lab capacity sets how fast those leads get tested.
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Anthropic says its agents worked autonomously and that the same triage would take an expert scientist weeks or months. The company supplies that comparison itself, the preprint is unreviewed, and the enzyme system's function is unknown.
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United Therapeutics is sponsoring the first xenotransplant clinical trial. Its first patient got a 10-edit pig kidney at NYU Langone in November. The longest a gene-edited pig kidney has worked in a person is 271 days, against years or decades for a human donor organ.
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Anthropic's new in-house molecular biology lab says a 21.5 hour agent run turned a 1.9 billion cluster database into 19 reports for humans to read, and one of them described a repeat array nobody had recorded.
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The company's new life sciences group says agents working from a single prompt flagged an enzyme system with CRISPR-like DNA repeats, and its scientists are still running experiments to find out what the system actually does.
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A repurposed retroviral shell protein lets a culture report its own gene activity again and again instead of once, so a single well becomes its own before-and-after control, at population-average resolution.
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HKUST and CUHK researchers report in Nature Communications that thermodynamic timing lets amplification and CRISPR detection share a single sealed tube, reaching 1 aM in 30 minutes. The announcement leaves out the clinical denominator.
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Peisheng Xu's group degraded the PTBP1 protein with antibodies ferried past the blood-brain barrier, and human astrocytes in a dish turned into firing neurons. In living mice, the lineage question is still open.
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A Yale-led study in Molecular Cell puts the RNA-tagging enzyme inside the cell division switch. Oncology programmes have been explaining what its drugs do a different way.
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DANDELION ranks genes by position in trans-regulatory networks rather than distance from a variant. Its asthma shortlist survived CRISPR screens and mouse models. The denominator is missing.
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Deleting the Y chromosome from cloned male embryos produced fertile female mice that bred with their male clone brothers. Whether XO animals stay fertile in other species is the constraint.
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