COOL members Petar Penev and Sara Fakhretaha-Aval, led by Drs. Jennifer Glass, Anton Petrov, and Loren Williams, identified supersized expansion segments within the large subunits of two Asgard archaea species. The team further characterized these expansion segments in collaboration with Dr. Robin Gutell's team at UT Austin. The exciting results provide greater detail about ribosomal evolution at the emergence of the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor from Archaea. The findings were accepted in Genome Biology and Evolution on August 12th.