"By following universal paralogs," says Kaçar, "we can connect the earliest steps of life on Earth to the tools of modern ...

Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived approximately four billion years ago. All plants, animals, and microbes can trace ...

Every organism alive on Earth, from oak trees to octopuses to the bacteria in our gut, belongs to a single extended family. Genetic evidence points back to one ancestral cell, a last common forebear ...

Ancient duplicated genes are giving scientists their first real clues about what life was like before all life on Earth ...

We have only one example of biology forming in the universe—life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways? How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like?

All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called "last universal common ...