Last universal common ancestor more complex than previously thought

Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - 12:30 in Biology & Nature

Scientists call it LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, but they don't know much about this great-grandparent of all living things. Many believe LUCA was little more than a crude assemblage of molecular parts, a chemical soup out of which evolution gradually constructed more complex forms. Some scientists still debate whether it was even a cell. New evidence suggests that LUCA was a sophisticated organism after all, with a complex structure recognizable as a cell, researchers report.

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