Anthropic's bacterial vault particle discovery

Anthropic's biology research team used Claude to discover vault particles in bacteria and their viruses, producing the first 3D structural model of a bacterial vault particle. Vault particles are large barrel-shaped protein structures first discovered in 1986 by Leonard Rome and Nancy Kedersha; their biological function remains unknown. Until this work, vault particles had only been found in complex organisms like animals and plants. Claude ran the wet-lab pipeline end-to-end, cutting particle isolation from three days to about 90 minutes and delivering a first 3D structural model in 34 hours rather than the weeks to months typical of manual methods. The project also surfaced limitations: Claude made some simple mistakes that required collaboration with machine learning researchers to address.