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Is LUCA a thermophilic progenote?

Nature Microbiology volume 1, Article number: 16229 (2016) Cite this article

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To the Editor — We wish to comment on several claims made in the paper by Weiss et al.1, which describes a genomic analysis that they believe is consistent with the origin of life and emergence of a progenote-like last universal common ancestor (LUCA) in hydrothermal vent conditions. The hydrothermal vent concept was proposed by researchers in the 1980s as an ocean would have been the dominant aqueous medium on the early Earth. Most would also agree that life could not begin in the open ocean because there is no obvious source of free energy to drive energetically uphill processes, so when the vent idea was first proposed it was welcomed2. The vents provide an obvious source of free energy in the form of redox potentials and pH gradients, and their sponge-like mineral structures could potentially serve as compartments. Furthermore, microbial life has adapted to vent conditions, so maybe it began there. Proponents adopted the idea and published numerous papers on the subject in the form of essays (for example, refs 3,4).

The article begins by reinforcing the frequent misconception that the terms ‘LUCA’ and ‘progenote’ share the same definition. They do not. Carl Woese and George Fox put forward the hypothesis that LUCA (also known as the cenancestor or most recent common ancestor of all life) was a progenote, which they defined as an organism “still in the process of evolving the relationship between genotype and phenotype”5. Fourteen years ago, one of us wrote an entry for the Encyclopedia of Molecular Biology6 discussing the relationship between the progenote and LUCA concepts. The conclusion reached at that time is still valid today: sequence data, including the data presented by Weiss et al., support the idea that LUCA was a prokaryotic cell using nucleic acids as genetic material, 20 genetically encoded amino acids, ribosomes for template-directed protein synthesis, and membranes that allowed for chemiosmotic coupling7,8. To consider a cellular organism with these properties as only “half-alive”1 reflects an uncommon definition of life.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Connecticut, Storrs, 06269-3125, Connecticut, USA

    Johann Peter Gogarten

  2. University of California, Santa Cruz, 95064, California, USA

    David Deamer

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  1. Johann Peter Gogarten
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Correspondence to David Deamer.

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Gogarten, J., Deamer, D. Is LUCA a thermophilic progenote?. Nat Microbiol 1, 16229 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.229

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