Claude helps solve the shape of a mysterious protein shell
Some good news from the lab. Anthropic reported on November 5 that Claude helped find the first 3D structure of a "vault" particle. It is a hollow protein shell built from a protein made by a bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria.
According to Anthropic, the project took under four months. A science-focused version of Claude scanned about 15 billion computer-predicted proteins to find vault-like shapes. The work is a preprint on bioRxiv, so other scientists have not reviewed it yet.
Anthropic also published a piece on how researchers use Claude for scientific discovery, which got 93 points on Hacker News.
This is what most of us hope AI will do: help science move faster, in the open. It is still a preprint, and the same speed can serve any kind of research, so careful checks matter. Bon, 15 billion proteins. Me, I cannot even find my keys.
