Genome rearrangements are certainly important during later evolution of the phyla. At the level of LUCA, i.e., prior to the splitting of the domains, it is not clear, if and to what extent rearrangements of the modern style occurred. In this regard we should bear in mind that the LUCA genome may have exhibited sense-antisense coding on both strands as suggested by Rodin and Carter. This position has been adopted and discussed in the present paper. Therefore, speculations concerning possible genome rearrangements may be a bridge too far.
He reviews some of his previous work and presents an alternative to the dominant ‘Ancient RNA world’ hypothesis.