{"id":230723,"date":"2026-02-06T17:07:15","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T23:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/rare-universal-paralog-genes-may-reveal-a-pre-luca-evolutionary-record"},"modified":"2026-02-06T17:07:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T23:07:15","slug":"rare-universal-paralog-genes-may-reveal-a-pre-luca-evolutionary-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/rare-universal-paralog-genes-may-reveal-a-pre-luca-evolutionary-record","title":{"rendered":"Rare \u2018universal paralog\u2019 genes may reveal a pre-LUCA evolutionary record"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/rare-universal-paralog-genes-may-reveal-a-pre-luca-evolutionary-record.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called \u201clast universal common ancestor\u201d (LUCA) represents the most ancient organism that researchers can study. Previous research on the last universal common ancestor has found that all the characteristics we see in organisms today, like having a cell membrane and a DNA genome, were already present by the time of this ancestor. So, if we want to understand how these foundational characteristics of life first emerged, then we need to be able to study evolutionary history prior to the last universal common ancestor.<\/p>\n<p>In an article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cell.com\/cell-genomics\/fulltext\/S2666-979X(26)00002-9\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal <i><i>Cell Genomics<\/i>,<\/i> scientists Aaron Goldman (Oberlin College), Greg Fournier (MIT), and Bet\u00fcl Ka\u00e7ar (University of Wisconsin\u2011Madison) describe a method to do just that.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhile the last universal common ancestor is the most ancient organism we can study with evolutionary methods,\u201d said Goldman, \u201csome of the genes in its genome were much older.\u201d The authors describe a type of gene family known as a \u201cuniversal paralog,\u201d which provides evidence of evolutionary events that occurred before the last universal common ancestor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called \u201clast universal common ancestor\u201d (LUCA) represents the most ancient organism that researchers can study. Previous research on the last universal common ancestor has found that all the characteristics we see in organisms today, like having a cell membrane [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}