Matt Durrant (@mgdurrant)

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What do vault particles do? Scientists have been asking this for 40 years. Our biology team at Anthropic set out to tackle this long-standing open question in cell biology, working with Claude.

We haven't uncovered their biological function yet, but we've found something new: vault proteins in prokaryotes that assemble into complexes that are larger than human vaults. And we show that we can engineer their shapes to produce even larger nanocapsules!

The mystery of vaults goes deeper than anyone knew...

Read the blog and technical report to learn more!
Blog: anthropic.com/research/inves…
Technical report: www-cdn.anthropic.com/76e55fbe85697a…

Very grateful to have such fantastic coauthors who made this research project possible, including Januka Athukoralage, @ntperry13, @PeterHYoon, @ekabrams, and @amirshanehsaz. A big thank you to Dr. Leonard Rome, who discovered vaults in 1986, for providing feedback on the technical report. Thank you to @FutureHouseSF for supporting me as a research fellow when I first started learning about vaults. And, of course, grateful to my many @AnthropicAI teammates that work tirelessly to make Claude the best model for biology!

Video and sound made by Claude (with artistic direction from @ntperry13). Showing the new bacteriophage-derived vault structure that we solved.

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Matt Durrant @mgdurrant 6d

Our vault paper is now up on biorxiv: biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

www.biorxiv.org Prokaryotic homologs of the major vault protein form engineerable vault nanocapsules Vaults are the largest ribonucleoprotein particles in eukaryotic cells, built from 78 copies of the major vault protein (MVP), yet their function remains unknown four decades after their discovery....

Matt Durrant @mgdurrant Sep 23

One takeaway from our technical report about ART is that you should try telling Claude to actually “look” at the DNA sequences you’re studying, not just analyze a FASTA with bioinformatics tools. You may be surprised to see what it can figure out!

Claude Verified account @claudeai Aug 27

Starting today, 10,000 scientists across every field, from math to chemistry to physics and more, can get Claude through our new Claude Team plan for scientists. Standard seats are free, and premium seats with 5x usage limits are $15 per month, an 80% discount, for one year.

Claude is becoming increasingly capable of scientific work, with recent progress on problems from advanced physics calculations to protein design. Alongside that progress, we've been investing in the research community: Claude Science launched in June, and our AI for Science program funds high-impact projects with free credits. Today's expansion builds on both.

Principal investigators (or equivalent) at academic and nonprofit research institutions can sign up, then add the researchers in their group. Over the coming months, we plan to extend the program well beyond the initial 10,000 seats.

Learn more: claude.com/programs/team-…

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Matt Durrant @mgdurrant Sep 23

If you find our work on ART interesting, see this recent paper from @_David_Li and @garykbrixi in the @BrianHie lab, who are using genomic language models for biological discovery. It's fantastic work and includes their announcement of UG27, another array-associated RT system, which our ART findings complement nicely. biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

www.biorxiv.org Coevolutionary mining of prokaryotic non-coding elements with a genome language model Microbial genomes encode non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) and nucleic-acid-interacting proteins essential to biology and biotechnology. However, discovery of these systems remains protein-centric and based...

Matt Durrant @mgdurrant Sep 23

Very excited to share some more details about what we’re working on at Anthropic! We’ve set up a molecular biology lab and a fantastic team to test Claude’s ideas at the bench. We’re sharing an early example of how Claude can initiate new discoveries, with more work to come soon. We have learned a lot so far, and we’re using what we’ve learned to help make Claude the best and safest model for biology.

Please reach out if you have ideas for how to use Claude to accelerate fundamental biology research!

Anthropic Verified account @AnthropicAI Sep 23

Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.

We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.

Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
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Matt Durrant

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