On the Nature of the Last Common Ancestor: A Story from its Translation Machinery

The Last Common Ancestor (LCA) is understood as a hypothetical population of organisms from which all extant living creatures are thought to have descended. Its biology and environment have been and continue to be the subject of discussions within the scientific community. Since the first bacterial genomes were obtained, multiple attempts to reconstruct the genetic content of the LCA have been made. In this review, we compare 10 of the most extensive reconstructions of the gene content possessed by the LCA as they relate to aspects of the translation machinery. Although each reconstruction has its own methodological biases and many disagree in the metabolic nature of the LCA all, to some extent, indicate that several components of the translation machinery are among the most conserved genetic elements. The datasets from each reconstruction clearly show that the LCA already had a largely complete translational system with a genetic code already in place and therefore was not a progenote. Among these features several ribosomal proteins, transcription factors like IF2, EF-G, and EF-Tu and both class I and class II aminoacyl tRNA synthetases were found in essentially all reconstructions. Due to the limitations of the various methodologies, some features such as the occurrence of rRNA posttranscriptional modified bases are not fully addressed. However, conserved as it is, non-universal ribosomal features found in various reconstructions indicate that LCA’s translation machinery was still evolving, thereby acquiring the domain specific features in the process. Although progenotes from the pre-LCA likely no longer exist recent results obtained by unraveling the early history of the ribosome and other genetic processes can provide insight to the nature of the pre-LCA world.