Researchers suggest life may have had two separate beginnings

An international research team led by Natalia Mrnjavac and William F. Martin from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf has published a study in Science Advances suggesting that the origin of cellular life may have occurred in two separate stages.

The study indicates that the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) possessed a genetic code and the ability to produce proteins, but its metabolism was not yet fully developed. Researchers propose that while the genetic code emerged once, bacteria and archaea may have independently developed different enzymes to perform similar chemical tasks, effectively taking two distinct paths to becoming independent cells.

To reconstruct this evolutionary history, scientists compared the genomes and protein structures of 552 bacterial and 401 archaeal isolates. The findings suggest that hydrothermal vents may have played a critical role, with metals in rocks potentially facilitating early metabolic reactions before enzymes were fully established.