It stands for “last universal common ancestor” — the one microbe that you, your dog, the guy who cut you off in traffic this morning, and the tree in your back yard all descended from.

That last universal common ancestor, which biologists affectionately nicknamed LUCA, wasn't so different from fairly complex bacteria alive today — and it lived in an ecosystem teeming with ...

Scientists have rewritten the history of life on Earth with a new estimate for the age of LUCA, or the Last Universal Common Ancestor, who is generally acknowledged as the common ancestor of all ...

These results provided strong evidence that the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all cellular life really existed, although we still know little about what this ancestor was like and how ...

all living beings today have a common ancestor, a small cell that the scientific community has named LUCA, for last universal common ancestor. But LUCA is not the origin of life. It's the oldest ...

You report evidence of an earlier origin of LUCA (the last universal common ancestor of all life), around 4.2 billion years ago. If LUCA emerged then, this would give just a 300-million-year ...

all life on earth originated from a single ancestor: in future decades, research would go on to show that there was likely a "last universal common ancestor" (LUCA) — a cell that existed about 4 ...

(A) Archaezoan hypothesis. (B) Symbiotic hypothesis. The shapes within the eukaryotic cell denote the nucleus, the endomembrane system, and the cytoskeleton. The irregular gray shape denotes a ...

That last universal common ancestor, which biologists affectionately nicknamed LUCA, wasn't so different from fairly complex bacteria alive today — and it lived in an ecosystem teeming with other ...