Betül Kaçar

When you look at the proteins, you're looking at the 20 amino acids, which may be a little easier way to track the information when we create the tree.

It's one perspective.

We are not that good at it yet, right?

If you're a biologist and you want to understand how life evolved from a molecular perspective, this would be the way to do it.

And this is what nature narrowed its code down to.

So when we think of nitrogen, when we think of carbon, when we think of sulfur, it's all in this, that all these nucleotides are built based on those elements.

Exactly.

That's the informatic perspective.

And it's important to emphasize that this is not engineered by humans.

This evolved by itself.

It appears to be a highly optimized chemical and information code.

It may indicate that a great deal of chemical evolution and this may...

indicate that a lot of selection pressure and Darwinian evolution happened prior to the rise of the last universal common ancestor.

Because this is almost a bridge that connects the earliest cells to the last universal common ancestor.

Yes, so when we talk about the tree, when we think about the root, if you ideally included all the living information or all the available information that comes from living organisms on your tree, then on the root of your tree lies the last universal common ancestor, Lukau.

We call it the last because it is sort of the first one that we can track because we don't know what we cannot track, right?

It's more like, I would think of it as more like a population, a group of organisms than a single- Okay, hold on a second.

Do you want me to be...

So first of all, it's not 3.5 is still a very conservative estimate.

I would say it's 3.8 is probably safer to say at this point.