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 ...
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 ...