facts matter...chemical engineer...not afraid of your lies
Joined December 2021
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the3rdestate retweeted
There are only 3 types of people still supporting Trump:
1. Billionaires who are enriched by Trump cronyism.
2. White Nationalist racists who salivate over shooting and deporting immigrants.
3. Low information Evangelical zealots who subscribe to wild conspiracy theories.
the3rdestate retweeted
Is there anyone in TrumpWorld that isn't a complete scumbag?
the3rdestate retweeted
My goodness, Martha McCallum had her ass handed to her in a way I've never seen before.
She likes to bully her guests, and move them away from topics that she can't defend.
Abdul El-Sayed wasn't having any of it. Dude is SPECIAL. Smart AF.
For content first....I saw if Pi is and infinite decimal thing then it will eventually contain itself. That's deep...cl
I do the ...cl because i always have and you can't stop a thing that sets you apart once committed...cl
The damage is done and the bottle cannot be recorked...Jack Smith is a Caitlyn Clark fan and it's on Congressional Record...cl
Wow, now Eric Schmitt just has to prove Fanni Willis was in Maryland at the WNBA game with Jack Smith and it's game over...cl @the3rdestate_cl
Clemson has a team that is learning and producing...that is what a great legacy coach does in Dabo...cl
the3rdestate retweeted
I'm not letting this go, and neither should you! Elon Musk rigged the 2024 election for Trump and some GOP members of Congress! The links below outline exactly how it was done! The Trump Regime is illegitimate and illegally wielding power to destroy America! They and all of their GOP accomplices must be immediately removed from power and imprisoned, including Musk! He and Trump are openly trying to rig the Midterms! Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, and our mainstream media, are covering this up! Many have known since 11/06/24! Demand that they expose it and take action! This is a fascist coup!
thiswillhold.substack.com/p/… thiswillhold.substack.com/p/…
Diesel prices are at RECORD highs with no relief in sight, all thanks to President Trump and his illegal war in Iran.
Read more on how Americans across the country are paying the price: democrats.senate.gov/newsroo…
the3rdestate retweeted
As someone who did this kind of genome mining work during my PhD, some thoughts on this Anthropic announcement:
First, the very simplified version of what they did is that they noticed two genes (one known, one new) sitting next to a weird repeating piece of DNA. More specifically, they described an unusual reverse transcriptase (RT) associated with a repetitive DNA array and an unknown accessory protein. This kind of process was used to understand CRISPR back in 2002 and was key to the gene editing tools we use today.
To put this into context, though, people have been finding RTs associated with CRISPR arrays since 2008, and this general kind of genome-neighborhood mining has been used to discover new biological systems for decades. The basic genome-mining strategy is well established, and there are now mature tools and published pipelines for doing much of this. There are papers that discover and experimentally validate dozens of new systems using this approach in a single study. Doing it in bacteriophage genomes is also nothing new (eg CasPhi).
Finding a weird cluster of genes and repeats is often the easy part. The hard part, and where the real discoveries come from, is figuring out what the system actually does. Eg for the bridge-RNA discovery in 2024 from @arcinstitute or the discovery of CasPhi in 2020 from @DoudnaJennifer they figured out the pieces of the system and the rules for what makes it work so it can be used.
Anthropic does not yet know what this does. They’ve shown that the repeat array produces RNAs, but not what those RNAs do, what the RT does with them, or whether the system has any of the programmable properties that make the CRISPR comparison justified.
I’m genuinely rooting for all of the frontier labs to seriously get into biological discovery, and I’m excited about what comes out of it. But announcing these very early, incremental findings with the framing of a major discovery doesn’t help. I’d much rather they set the bar high now, so that when an AI actually discovers a fundamentally new biological mechanism, everyone appreciates how big a deal it is.
Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.
We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
the3rdestate retweeted
I wish we didn’t need these again, but here is the honest version of Anthropic’s biology announcement 🥳🥳🥳
(Caveat: I haven’t worked in bioinformatics for many years.)
The good: Anthropic ran ~950 Claude agents over a large biological sequence database. Claude searched, wrote code, compared sequences and genomic neighborhoods, and found an interesting pattern that apparently had not been noticed before: a known reverse transcriptase associated with another gene and a repetitive DNA array.
That is cool. Automating this kind of open-ended bioinformatics search at scale is useful, and Claude may have found a lead a human would have missed.
But: Claude did not do a biological experiment. It searched databases and analyzed data.
Humans then took the candidate into the wet lab. And the wet-lab result so far is modest: they showed that the repeat array produces short RNAs.
We still don’t know what the system does. No function, mechanism, phenotype, targeting, defense activity, or programmability has been demonstrated.
This is also where the CRISPR framing gets ahead of the result. Right now, “it has some features reminiscent of known programmable systems” is a hypothesis for what to investigate next, not a discovery that it behaves like CRISPR.
And there is a missing baseline: bioinformatics has had tools for finding unusual gene neighborhoods and candidate systems for years. The interesting comparison is 950 Claude agents vs. an expert using the best existing computational pipelines - not Claude vs. someone manually looking through 200,000 sequences.
So my honest announcement would be:
Claude autonomously found an interesting candidate for a previously uncharacterized biological system. A small human wet-lab experiment confirmed that part of the candidate is expressed. We don’t yet know what it does.
That is a good result.
But in a regular biology lab, this isn’t the finished paper. It is the result you show at lab meeting and say: “This looks interesting. Now we need to figure out what the hell it does.”
Maybe that next step leads to a major discovery. But that discovery hasn’t happened yet.
Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.
We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
