Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- initialism taxonomy, biology, paleontology Last universal common ancestor; the hypothesised most recent
primordial organism that is an ancestor to all organisms now living.
Etymologies
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Examples
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One says that the Last Universal Common Ancestor or LUCA formed as “life” when genetic material came together and self-replication could begin.
First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011
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I believe, there is empirical reasons to believe, that the LUCA was derived from independently evolved lineages via symbiosis.
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One says that the Last Universal Common Ancestor or LUCA formed as “life” when genetic material came together and self-replication could begin.
First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011
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So any discovery of a life-form not descended from LUCA would provide this remarkable bonus: Finding Extraterrestrial Life 2.0 would make far more clear what Earthly Life 1.0 actually entails, and what is needed for something to be alive.
First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011
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Yet these vast oceans of organic molecules in their millions of microenvironments were somehow able to find each other (in literal oceans mind you) combine all their resources (we're talking about molecular structures – not Titanic sized ships) through HGT and the like (I prefer the scientific term 'swapping spit' myself) to produce the LUCA with its universal DNA!
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So any discovery of a life-form not descended from LUCA would provide this remarkable bonus: Finding Extraterrestrial Life 2.0 would make far more clear what Earthly Life 1.0 actually entails, and what is needed for something to be alive.
First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011
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We should be able to, someday, trace ourselves back through 50 billion DNA copyings over 4 billion years to determine our LUCA.
Patrick Takahashi: Science and the Future of Cloning: Is Immortality Possible? 2010
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We should be able to, someday, trace ourselves back through 50 billion DNA copyings over 4 billion years to determine our LUCA.
Patrick Takahashi: Science and the Future of Cloning: Is Immortality Possible? Patrick Takahashi 2010
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The only significance of the LUCA is that it represents just the *last* time this happened on a global scale. but different genes, etc., might have done it differently, producing different trees, but nevertheless there is good evidence that a bunch of genes did this, as Theobald shows
Common ancestry passes another test. News at 11. - The Panda's Thumb 2010
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We should be able to, someday, trace ourselves back through 50 billion DNA copyings over 4 billion years to determine our LUCA.
Patrick Takahashi: Science and the Future of Cloning: Is Immortality Possible? 2010
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It’s not the first attempt to sketch the identity of the hypothetical last universal common ancestor, or LUCA.
Our last common ancestor lived 4.2 billion years ago—perhaps hundreds of millions of years earlier than thought Robert F. Service 2024
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