Anthropic says Claude helped map a bacterial vault particle's structure

We’re sharing how our biology research team worked with Claude to map the first 3D structure of a vault particle from bacterial life. Vault particles are a longstanding mystery. They are barrel-shaped objects, among the largest protein structures found in our cells. They were first discovered by Leonard Rome and Nancy Kedersha in 1986, but their function remains unknown. With Claude, we’ve found results that might bring us closer to solving that mystery. Until now, vaults were only known in the cells of complex things like animals and plants. We have shown that similar proteins from bacteria (and the viruses that infect them) can also assemble into vaults. Finding the structures in these simpler forms of life may make it easier to investigate their function in our own cells. For our life…

Let me explain what just happened. Anthropic’s biology team used Claude to solve a piece of a 40 year old mystery. And most of them had limited experience in structural biology. The mystery is called a vault particle. It’s a huge hollow barrel made of protein (about 3x the size of a ribosome, the cell’s protein factory) found in almost every cell in your body. Scientists discovered it in 1986. Nobody knows what it does. Mice without vaults live totally normal lives, which makes it even weirder. So the team asked a simpler question: do bacteria and viruses have vaults too? Claude searched a database of about 15 billion predicted proteins for relatives of the vault protein. The team picked 44 candidates. Claude designed the DNA to produce each one. 7 of the ones they tested formed real…