Claude scanned 15 billion predicted proteins to crack the first 3D structure of vault particles
winer666 · reddit · 2026-11-07
- Anthropic announced (Nov 5) that Claude helped determine the first 3D structure of a vault particle — a hollow protein shell encoded by a bacteriophage; the work is a preprint on bioRxiv, not yet peer-reviewed.
- The project ran under four months: the science-focused Claude scanned 15 billion computer-predicted proteins for vault-like structures, and the team then confirmed the structure experimentally.
- Vault particles' biological role remains poorly understood, so AI here didn't just speed up a known pipeline — it helped pick the target in the first place, a shift from assisting experiments to shaping which experiments get run.
- Caveats: it's a preprint, and the write-up comes from Anthropic itself, so independent replication matters.
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