Team Hopeful In Its Effort To Recreate Primal Life

Scientists analyzing the genomes of microbes believe that they have reconstructed the pivotal event that created the one-celled organism from which all animals and plants are descended, including people. The event was the merger of two primitive bacterial-type cells into a eukaryote, the type of cell in all multicellular organisms. Dr. James A. Lake, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he had spent four years constructing the computer program that led to the analysis, which is being published today in Nature. William Martin, an expert on early life at the University of Düsseldorf in Germany, describes the work of Dr. Lake's team as a major contribution to the study of early evolution.

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