In article <2b27c8$3iq$1 at uniwa.uwa.edu.au> andrewh at uniwa.uwa.edu.au (Andrew Hobbs) writes:
>>Hi,
>>One fact which I am not clear about since I haven't read the original
>article. Did Woese imply that his progenote was the last common
>ancestor of modern organisms? Many of the replies seem to be assuming
>that he did. Yet the description seems to me to be compatible with it
>being an early RNA form which then evolved into the last common
>ancestor with its long DNA genes, highly evolved enzymes etc.
>Can anyone help.
>>Andrew
>>andrewh at uniwa.uwa.edu.au>>
In their 1977 paper Woese and Fox [Woese, C.R. and Fox, G.E.:
The concept of cellular evolution, 1977, J. Mol. Evol. 10, 1-6]
define the progenotic stage. They conclude their paper as
follows:
"It is at this progenotic state, not the procaryote stage, that the
line of descent leading to the eucaryotic cytoplasm diverged from
the bacterial lines of descent."
