Looking for the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)
نویسندگان
چکیده
Genomic sequences across diverse species seem to align towards a common ancestry, eventually implying that eons ago some universal antecedent organism would have lived on the face of Earth. However, when evolution is understood not only as a biological process but as a general thermodynamic process, it becomes apparent that the quest for the last universal common ancestor is unattainable. Ambiguities in alignments are unavoidable because the driving forces and paths of evolution cannot be separated from each other. Thus tracking down life's origin is by its nature a non-computable task. The thermodynamic tenet clarifies that evolution is a path-dependent process of least-time consumption of free energy. The natural process is without a demarcation line between animate and inanimate.
منابع مشابه
Computational reconstruction of ancestral genomic regions from evolutionarily conserved gene clusters
Reconstruction of ancestral genomic features can be considered on multiple evolutionary scopes and at different levels of biological sequence information. For instance, one could anticipate the reconstruction of genomic features for the last common ancestor of all species on Earth, last universal common ancestor or LUCA, whereas others would focus on reconstructing these features in the last co...
متن کاملPii: S0378-1119(01)00781-8
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Organisms represented by the root of the universal evolutionary tree were most likely complex cells with a sophisticated protein translation system and a DNA genome encoding hundreds of genes. The growth of bioinformatics data from taxonomically diverse organisms has made it possible to infer the likely properties of early life in greater detail. Here we present LUCApedia, (http://eeb.princeton...
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