Luca

Luca

The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the most recent population from which all organisms now living on Earth share common descent—the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth. This includes all cellular organisms, but not necessarily viruses. The LUCA is not the first life on Earth; it may have lived among a diversity of other organisms whose descendants all died out. Rather LUCA is the most recent form from which all surviving life on Earth is descended. While no specific fossil evidence of the LUCA exists, the detailed biochemical similarity of all current life makes it plausible. Its characteristics can be inferred from shared features of modern genomes. These genes describe a complex life form with many co-adapted features, including transcription and translation mechanisms to convert information from DNA to mRNA to proteins. The LUCA probably lived in the high-temperature water of deep sea vents near ocean-floor magma flows around 4 billion years ago.

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