Researchers Rethink the Ancestry of Complex Cells

Meanwhile, other researchers have suggested that the earliest “ancestor” of all eukaryotes might not have been a single cell at all, but rather a mixed population of cells that avidly swapped DNA. Somehow, over an unknown number of millennia, FECA turned into the last eukaryotic common ancestor, or LECA — an organism ancestral to every other subsequent eukaryote living or extinct, including ones currently unknown to science. In an essay for Nature Ecology & Evolution, O’Malley and her colleagues discussed the implications if LECA was not a single cell but really a population of genetically diverse cells, none of which had all the characteristics associated with eukaryotes today.

Source: www.quantamagazine.org