Claude mapped a mystery protein vault in 34 hours

Anthropic's biology team used Claude to map the first 3D structure of a vault particle from bacterial life: a phage protein called L05 that self-assembles into a hollow barrel of 96 copies inside E. coli, a 9.5-megadalton shell enclosing about 25% more volume than the mammalian version.

Claude searched some 15 billion predicted protein sequences to find the candidates, and the first full structural model was ready in 34 hours. The honest footnote: Claude also made consequential mistakes — one bad protocol additive delayed the project two weeks, and an early cryo-EM run produced a mirror-image map. The work is a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed.