LUCA — The Last Universal Common Ancestor
“…whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” — C. Darwin
Working backwards to the origin of life…
William F. Martin, Ph.D. is a former carpenter, born in Bethesda, Maryland, educated in Texas, who after hammering nails in Dallas moved to Hanover, Germany to get his degree in biology, and then to the Max-Planck Institute in Cologne for his Ph.D.
In July 2016, Madeline Weiss et al. from Martin’s lab published a paper in Nature Microbiology that worked backwards from today’s organisms to uncover what they described as the last universal common ancestor to all life on Earth — LUCA. They showed that LUCA was anerobic (did not use oxygen), obtained energy from hydrogen, converted carbon dioxide and nitrogen into essential organic compounds, and was heat loving. Extreme heat loving. They believed that LUCA originated in an environment much like the black smoker hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, discovered in 1977 by explorers in the deep-sea submersible, Alvin.
How did Martin’s group work backwards from today’s organisms to LUCA?
