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The cenancestor is the most recent ancestral specie from which all extant living species have evolved. The idea that all present-day life is related by common ancestry was already suggested by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1872). Nowadays, this hypothesis is strongly supported by the similarities at the biochemical and molecular levels of all organisms belonging to the three domains of life, i.e., Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya. The nature of this ancestral entity continues to be a matter of debate. Its level of complexity (in number of genes), the chemical nature of its genome (whether DNA or RNA), or its prokaryotic-like nature have been discussed along other aspects of its biology.
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© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Delaye, L. (2014). Cenancestor. In: Amils, R., et al. Encyclopedia of Astrobiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_256-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_256-4
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Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-27833-4
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