Where do we come from? A 4-billion-year journey to the origin of our cells - an article by Purificación López García

Inducted into the French Academy of Sciences in January 2025, Purificación López García is interested in the origin and major diversifications of life on Earth. She studies the diversity, ecology and evolution of microorganisms in the three domains of life (archaea, bacteria, eukaryotes). With David Moreira, she has put forward an innovative hypothesis to explain the origin of the eukaryotic cell, the cell of which plants, animals and fungi, among others, are composed. She has been a CNRS research director since 2007 in the Ecology-Society-Evolution unit at Université Paris-Saclay, and was awarded the CNRS silver medal in 2017. She told Benoît Tonson, head of the Science et Technologie section, about her career and discoveries.