Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived ...

Scientists think they’ve found a way to investigate the creation of cell membranes and DNA genomes that gave rise to the last ...

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these ...

The mystery of life’s beginnings has long captivated scientists. Central to that search is LUCA—the last universal common ancestor. LUCA sits at the root of the evolutionary tree, where two great ...

Researchers Gregory Goldman, Gregory Fournier, and Betul Kacar have identified a rare class of ancient gene families, called ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A study suggests that ...

All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called “last universal common ancestor” represents the most ancient organism that researchers can study.

New research into "universal paralog" genes reveals that the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) was not the first spark of life, but a successor that inherited complex genetic tools from an even ...