"By following universal paralogs," says Kaçar, "we can connect the earliest steps of life on Earth to the tools of modern ...

Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived ...

Ancient duplicated genes are giving scientists their first real clues about what life was like before all life on Earth ...

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these ...

Scientists now believe life began long before LUCA. Older organisms, now vanished, passed on vital genetic tools. These ...

Duplicated genes that appear in every branch of the tree of life can provide us with insight into the evolution that occurred ...

When cells divide and chromosomes are replicated for the daughter cells in a select type of cell called the germline, which is happening constantly in living things, sometimes things don’t go ...

Data from a new study links a pair of duplicated genes to human brain features. The research provides a roadmap for scientists to gain a deeper understanding of brain function and evolution, as well ...

Findings suggest that new genes can form by repurposing fragments of ancestral genes while incorporating entirely new coding regions (the protein-coding parts of the DNA). This innovative concept ...

What makes the human brain distinctive? A new study published July 21 in Cell identifies two genes linked to human brain features and provides a road map to discover many more. The research could lead ...

What makes the human brain distinctive? A new study published July 21 in Cell identifies two genes linked to human brain features and provides a road map to discover many more. The research could lead ...