The pioneers of the CRISPR gene-editing tool won a Nobel prize in 2020, and for good reason. The breakthrough has revolutionised biology, and is also transforming medicine and farming. Now, AI company Anthropic has announced that it has discovered an enzyme system with properties “reminiscent of CRISPR”.
In fact, though, the two discoveries aren’t remotely comparable. On 23 September, Anthropic said it has turned its attention to biology and that its large language model, called Claude, has discovered “a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats”. How CRISPR therapy could cure everything from cancer to infertility What Anthropic did was ask Claude to search through a large DNA database for “interesting new” proteins of a kind called a reverse transcriptase.
These are enzymes that can make a DNA copy of an RNA sequence. Normally, DNA is transcribed into RNA, hence the reverse part. Why is Anthropic interested in reverse transcriptases?
Because if the aim is to genetically engineer anything from bacteria to people, being able to add specific DNA sequences to specific sites in a genome is really useful. There are already ways of doing this, but they all have limitations. Claude agents found around 200,000 sequences in the database that probably code for reverse transcriptases.
While analysing one family of reverse transcriptases, which are found in bacteria-infecting viruses, one agent detected a series of repeated sequences next to the sequence for the reverse transcriptase. What you need to know here is that CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. In other words, an area of DNA where there are lots of short repeated sequences separated by non-repeating DNA.
Such repeats were first spotted in E. coli in 1987 by researchers in Japan and later dubbed CRISPR by Francisco Mojica at the University of Alicante in Spain. In 2005, Mojica reported that the pieces of non-repeating DNA match bits of viral DNA. He correctly deduced this must be some kind of bacterial immune system, but it took years of research by many different teams to uncover how it works, with a protein called CRISPR-Cas9 playing a key role.
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