The organism that gave rise to all life present on Earth may have evolved much earlier than once thought, just a few hundred million years after the planet formed, and been more sophisticated than previous assessments have suggested.
The DNA found in all present-day organisms, ranging from E. coli to blue whales, shares numerous similarities, implying a lineage that extends billions of years back to a single ancestral source – LUCA. Despite numerous attempts to unravel LUCA’s mysteries, a recent comprehensive study has yielded unexpected findings.
“What we’ve been trying to do is bring people representative of different disciplines together to come up with a holistic understanding of when LUCA existed and what its biology was,” says Philip Donoghue at the University of Bristol in the UK.
Genetic Insights: Reconstructing LUCA
Scientific Debate: Interpreting LUCA’s Significance
“Because their reconstruction suggests that LUCA had genes for protecting against UV damage, it is most likely that it lived at the surface of the ocean, the researchers think. Other genes suggest LUCA fed on hydrogen, which is in line with previous studies. It may have been part of an ecosystem of other kinds of primitive cells that died out, the team speculates. “I think it’s naive in the extreme to think that LUCA would have existed on its own,” says Donoghue.
“I find this compelling from an evolutionary perspective,” says Greg Fournier at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “LUCA is not the beginning of the story of life, but just the last shared ancestor state that we can work backwards to using genome data.”
“The results also suggest LUCA had a primitive version of the bacterial defence system known as CRISPR, to fight off viruses. “Even 4.2 billion years ago, our earliest ancestors are fighting off viruses,” says team member Edmund Moody, also at the University of Bristol.
“Peering back into the deep past is fraught with uncertainty, and Donoghue is the first to admit that his team may have missed the mark. “It’s almost certainly all wrong,” he says. “What we’re trying to do is push the envelope, and create the first kind of attempt at integrating all of the relevant evidence.”
“It won’t be the last word,” he says. “It won’t even be our last word on this topic, but we think it’s a good start.”
