🔗 Last universal ancestor

🔗 Biology 🔗 Genetics 🔗 Computational Biology 🔗 Evolutionary biology 🔗 Human Genetic History

The last universal common ancestor (LUCA), also called the last universal ancestor (LUA), or concestor, is the most recent population of organisms from which all organisms now living on Earth have a common descent, the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth. (A related concept is that of progenote.) LUCA is not thought to be the first life on Earth but only one of many early organisms, all the others becoming extinct.

While there is no specific fossil evidence of LUCA, it can be studied by comparing the genomes of all modern organisms, its descendants. By this means, a 2016 study identified a set of 355 genes most likely to have been present in LUCA. (However, some of those genes could have developed later, then spread universally by horizontal gene transfer between archaea and bacteria.) The genes describe a complex life form with many co-adapted features, including transcription and translation mechanisms to convert information from DNA to RNA to proteins. The study concluded that the LUCA probably lived in the high-temperature water of deep sea vents near ocean-floor magma flows.

Studies from 2000 to 2018 have suggested an increasingly ancient time for LUCA. In 2000, estimations suggested LUCA existed 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago in the Paleoarchean era, a few hundred million years after the earliest fossil evidence of life, for which there are several candidates ranging in age from 3.48 to 4.28 billion years ago. A 2018 study from the University of Bristol, applying a molecular clock model, places the LUCA shortly after 4.5 billion years ago, within the Hadean.

Charles Darwin first proposed the theory of universal common descent through an evolutionary process in his book On the Origin of Species in 1859: "Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed." Later biologists have separated the problem of the origin of life from that of the LUCA.