Tang Shiping, Gao Ming
Center for Complex Decision Analysis, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.
Life (Basel). 2025 Jan 10;15(1):75. doi: 10.3390/life15010075.
Carl Woese's thesis of cellular evolution emphasized that the last universal common/cellular ancestor (LUCA) must have evolved by drawing from "global inventions". Yet, existing theories regarding the origin(s) of LUCA have mostly centered upon scenarios that LUCA had evolved mostly independently. In an earlier paper, we advanced a new theory regarding the origin(s) of LUCA that extends Woese's original insights. Our theory centers upon the possibility that different vesicles and protocells can merge with and acquire each other as a form of variation, selection, and retention, driven by wet-and-dry cycles and other similar cyclical processes. In this paper, we use computer simulation to show that under a variety of simulated conditions, LUCA can indeed be produced by our proposed processes. We hope that our study can stimulate laboratory testing of some key hypotheses that vesicles' absorption, acquisition, and merger has indeed been a central force in driving the evolution of LUCA.
卡尔·沃斯的细胞进化理论强调，最后的普遍共同/细胞祖先（LUCA）肯定是通过借鉴“全球发明”而进化的。然而，现有的关于LUCA起源的理论大多集中在LUCA大多是独立进化的情景上。在早期的一篇论文中，我们提出了一个关于LUCA起源的新理论，该理论扩展了沃斯的原始见解。我们的理论集中在这样一种可能性上，即不同的囊泡和原始细胞可以相互融合并获取彼此，作为一种变异、选择和保留的形式，由干湿循环和其他类似的周期性过程驱动。在本文中，我们使用计算机模拟来表明，在各种模拟条件下，LUCA确实可以由我们提出的过程产生。我们希望我们的研究能够激发对一些关键假设的实验室测试，即囊泡的吸收、获取和融合确实是推动LUCA进化的核心力量。
