Unraveling LUCA

The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) is the primordial organism that gave rise to diversified life. Its make up is embedded in all the genomes that exist today on Earth. A paper by Kyung Mo Kim and Gustavo Caetano-Anollés was recently published in BMC Evolutionary Biology (11:140, 2011), "The proteomic complexity and rise of the primordial ancestor of diversified life". The study describes the proteome of LUCA and makes an account of the structures and functions that are associated with this ancient cellular organism that populated our world about 3 billion years ago.