Life on Earth had to begin somewhere, and scientists think that “somewhere” is LUCA—or the Last Universal Common Ancestor.

all the way back to the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA, a hypothetical population of organisms that lived roughly 4 billion years ago and represents the shared progenitor of all species ...

Scientists are making a case for adjusting our understanding of how exactly genes first emerged. For a while, there’s been a consensus about the order in which the building-bloc ...

These results provided strong evidence that the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all cellular life really existed, although we still know little about what this ancestor was like and how ...

What we can know about biology before the last universal common ancestor is limited—and we should be circumspect in filling in the gaps. In a world in which magical thinking persists in popular ...

(A) Archaezoan hypothesis. (B) Symbiotic hypothesis. The shapes within the eukaryotic cell denote the nucleus, the endomembrane system, and the cytoskeleton. The irregular gray shape denotes a ...

All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A new study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation.

NIH’s plan to reduce indirect funds faced immense backlash from researchers. A federal judge ruled to extend the halt to cuts until a final decision is made. A series of rodent experiments showed that ...

A genetic reconstruction shows the Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA, was a simple organism that lived off the gases spewing out of the Earth's crust This advertisement has not loaded yet ...