Scientists discover how life began before Earth’s first universal ancestor

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

Genetic hints reveal the roots of the tree of life before the last universal common ancestor

Duplicated genes that appear in every branch of the tree of life can provide us with insight into the evolution that occurred ...
EurekAlert!

Scientists describe a window into evolution before the tree of life

Researchers describe a rare type of gene family, known as “universal paralogs”, that provides insight into evolutionary history predating the last universal common ancestor of all life. Detailed ...
The Scientist

Transfer RNA transforms tree of life

"They're molecular fossils." Caetano-Anollés and his colleague Feng-Jie Sun investigated the sequence and structure of hundreds of tRNAs to probe for deep evolutionary relationships in the tree of ...

Before the first cell existed, who came first? Why scientists now believe in ‘Ghost Genes’ may be older than life itself

Scientists now believe life began long before LUCA. Older organisms, now vanished, passed on vital genetic tools. These 'pre-LUCA' ancestors developed complex biological functions. LUCA inherited ...
ScienceAlert on MSN

All Life on Earth Shares an Ancestor – And Some of Our Genes Predate It

The last common ancestor of all living things did not just suddenly appear on Earth roughly 4.2 billion years ago. Some of its genes came from an even older and more mysterious source… "While the last ...