Common descent is a concept in evolutionary biology applicable when one species is the ancestor of two or more species later in time. ... 6,331 groups of genes common to all living animals have been identified; these may have arisen from a single common ancestor that lived 650 million years...
All theories about the origin and evolution of membrane bound cells necessarily have to cope with the nature of the last common ancestor of cellular life. One of the most important aspect of this ancestor, whether it had a closed biological membrane or not, has recently been intensely debated....
Since the reclassification of all life forms in three Domains (Archaea, Bacteria, Eukarya), the identity of their alleged forerunner (Last Universal Common Ancestor or LUCA) has been the subject of extensive controversies: progenote or already complex organism, prokaryote or protoeukaryote, thermophile...
Well, just as mitochondrial DNA is passed on relatively intact only from mother to child, the Y chromosome is passed on only from fathers to sons. Using the same sort of “molecular clock” that indicated how far back a common female ancestor was, geneticists have determined that the most r...
Since the reclassification of all life forms in three Domains (Archaea, Bacteria, Eukarya), the identity of their alleged forerunner (Last Universal Common Ancestor or LUCA) has been the subject of extensive controversies: progenote or already complex organism, prokaryote or protoeukaryote, thermophile...
One of the fundamental questions in insect evolution is the origin of their wings and primary function of ancestral wing precursors. Recent phylogenomic and comparative morphological studies broadly support a terrestrial ancestor of pterygotes, but an aq
Termites digest wood using Carbohydrate-Active Enzymes (CAZymes) produced by gut bacteria with whom they have cospeciated at geological timescales. Whether CAZymes were encoded in the genomes of their ancestor’s gut bacteria and transmitted to modern te
The ultimate consequence of Darwin’s theory of common descent implies that all life on earth descends ultimately from a common ancestor. Biochemistry and molecular biology now provide sufficient evidence of shared ancestry of all extant life forms. However, the nature of the Last Universal Common ...
What is the phrase in evolutionary biology that describes the tendency for people to ascribe meaning to the way species evolved? In which part of the gene do you expect to see a non-synonymous variation? What does the pattern of genetic variation in modern human tell us about the ori...
To mitigate the effect of LGT, we examined the relative order of emergence for the 25 bacterial groups using 63,324 trees rooted with minimal ancestor deviation (MAD)54. In current practice, the majority of root inferences for the domain Bacteria have been done with outgroup rooting55,56. ...