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    "parsed_content": "In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of LifeA scrappy science project led to a significant discovery: two new species of a rare organism that could elucidate a fundamental transition in the history of life on our planet.In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of LifeA scrappy science project led to a significant discovery: two new species of a rare organism that could elucidate a fundamental transition in the history of life on our planet.Credit...Supported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTListen \u00b7 13:04 min Share full articleBy Carolyn Y. JohnsonSept. 26, 2026On a spring day last year, Andrew Willoughby drove three and a half hours to a cheap motel in Nags Head, N.C. From the parking lot, he texted a stranger he had met online.Julia Van Etten appeared, ushering him past a \u201cDo Not Disturb\u201d sign into one of the motel\u2019s $80 rooms, which she had secretly turned into a makeshift lab. Jugs of brackish water lined the walls. Buckets overflowed with hunks of marsh grass. Bedside tables served as microscope stands.\u201cOh my god, these people are legit,\u201d Dr. Willoughby, a biologist who studies plant genomes, thought to himself as he found a spot to sit on the corner of the bed.Over the next few days, a small group of scientists led by Dr. Van Etten, an evolutionary biologist, scoured drops of water for swamp algae. The team \u2014 brought together, in part, by disruptions and despair over the Trump administration\u2019s freezes to federal science funding \u2014 then made an exciting discovery.Julia Van Etten, seen from John Burns\u2019s microscope set-up in a motel in North Carolina last year; Dr. Burns, seen from Dr. Van Etten\u2019s bed-top workstation.Credit...via Julia Van EttenIn the Journal of Phycology, Dr. Van Etten and her colleagues describe their motel-room find: two new species of a single-celled organism called Paulinella, a scaly, grenade-shaped microbe with sausage-shaped green lumps inside. Their discovery brings the world\u2019s known total of photosynthetic Paulinella species to six.What makes Paulinella important to biologists? Almost all complex photosynthetic life on Earth, from redwood trees to ferns to algae, traces back to an event 1.5 billion years ago. That\u2019s when a single-celled organism engulfed a photosynthetic bacterium, turning it into a kind of energy-generating packet \u2014 what scientists call an \u201corganelle.\u201d But two decades ago, biologists discovered that this photosynthetic merger had happened a second time, in Paulinella, about 100 million years ago.Because it happened so recently, evolutionarily speaking, Paulinella\u2019s biology might offer a window into that first, improbably profound event: the moment when the planet began to bloom, becoming an oasis for life in the vast, dark emptiness of space.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe pivotal event that underlies plant life on Earth is hard to study because it\u2019s so ancient, said Angela Oliverio, a biologist at Syracuse University who was not involved in the study. But in Paulinella, it\u2019s not complete \u2014 like seeing a snapshot of the process midway through.\u201cIt\u2019s really amazing to me,\u201d Dr. Oliverio said. This \u201crepresents the only other case right now of where this chance evolutionary event occurred.\u201dStudying Paulinella, scientists hope, will elucidate one of the most fundamental transitions in the history of life on our planet \u2014 and possibly give clues to how it might happen elsewhere in the universe. It could also provide practical insights on how to engineer photosynthetic organisms from scratch. At the very least, the quest illustrates the curiosity, tenacity and human relationships that advance knowledge.ImageDr. Van Etten and Andrew Willoughby in Lake Greenbelt, Md.Credit...Alexander Justel BetancourtA \u2018couch microscopist\u2019The first species of Paulinella was discovered on Dec. 24, 1894, in the sediments of a backwater of the Rhine River by the German biologist Robert Lauterborn. He named the genus after his stepmother, Pauline. But it wasn\u2019t until 2005, with the use of genetic analysis, that scientists learned that the supposedly unique event that shaped plant life on Earth wasn\u2019t actually unique. Since then, scientists had documented only three other species.In some ways, that\u2019s not surprising. The planet is teeming with hidden biodiversity that has never been formally cataloged. And Paulinella doesn\u2019t make finding it easy. It\u2019s scarce, outnumbered by other microbes in water samples. It\u2019s small. It grows slowly, if at all, in labs.\u201cNo graduate student wants to work on an organism that takes four to five days to double \u2014 you\u2019ll get that Ph.D. in 10 years,\u201d said Arthur Grossman, a plant biologist at Carnegie Science, a research institution.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTDr. Van Etten\u2019s own voyage of discovery began when she found herself stuck on a rainy family vacation in North Carolina. She was a graduate student at Rutgers University at the time and a self-declared \u201ccouch microscopist,\u201d spending much of her free time hunched over a $300 microscope on her sofa looking for life in water droplets.Her mother knew what would cheer her up: She urged her to go outside and take some samples.Dr. Van Etten didn\u2019t expect much from the water she had scooped from a random dock next to the highway. But among a mash of yellowish-brown plankton, she spotted a small green dot. She zoomed in, and then she shrieked.\u201cOMG,\u201d she texted to her doctoral adviser at Rutgers.It was an elusive Paulinella cell \u2014 like finding a needle in a thousand haystacks.Dr. Van Etten sampling at a site in North Carolina in 2021. Dr. Van Etten's first sighting of the Paulinella cell, in green, center, with her at-home microscope.Credit...via Julia Van EttenTo be sure of what, exactly, she was looking at, Dr. Van Etten needed to find more specimens and isolate them. Over the next four years, she made a few return journeys to North Carolina to gather more samples, but it wasn\u2019t until 2025 that she made her most fruitful trip \u2014 as the scientific career she\u2019d long dreamed of seemed to be in jeopardy.In January of that year, a week after President Trump was inaugurated, the White House budget office issued a memo announcing a freeze on federal funding, pending a review of whether the money supported activities that conflicted with new administration priorities, including ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs.The National Science Foundation took its payment system offline.Dr. Van Etten \u2014 then a research fellow at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod \u2014 was one of those locked out of her prestigious, $60,000-a-year fellowship from the National Science Foundation.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTDr. Van Etten kept working unpaid, under a cloud of uncertainty. A group chat with roughly 300 scientists, which had been used mainly for advice during tax season, turned into a career lifeline. The scientists \u2014 early in their careers and who often had little financial cushion to bridge even one missing paycheck \u2014 shared information, strategized and commiserated.One day, Dr. Van Etten shared that she was having a particularly difficult time. A few moments later, Dr. Willoughby showed up in her DMs.As with so many of the freezes to federal funding, this one was disruptive and confusing, but temporary. A judge stepped in, the Trump administration rescinded its memo and the science foundation turned its payment system back on a week later. Some scientists did lose funding because their grants were deemed \u201cnot aligned with program goals.\u201d Many, like Dr. Van Etten and Dr. Willoughby, were shaken but able to resume their work.The story could have ended there. Instead, the episode catalyzed a new scientific collaboration.A mouth pipette and a steampunk toothbrushFrom left, Debashish Bhattacharya, Timothy G. Stephens, Dr. Van Etten and Erin C. Chile, in a North Carolina motel in 2024. A sampling site.Credit...via Julia Van EttenDr. Van Etten and Dr. Willoughby are both biologists, but they might as well have been working in different worlds. Dr. Van Etten\u2019s focus was on microbes. Dr. Willoughby, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University, spent his attention on a group of flowering plants called streptocarpus, which includes houseplants like the Cape primrose.Thrown together by hopelessness and fear, Dr. Van Etten and Dr. Willoughby started to talk science. She told him about her next trip to hunt for Paulinella.\u201cYou should totally come,\u201d she said.Which is how, in spring 2025, Dr. Willoughby found himself squeezed into an improvised lab with Dr. Van Etten and John Burns, a senior research scientist from Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine.Within minutes of Dr. Willoughby\u2019s arrival at the motel, Dr. Burns started deploying a steampunk scientific instrument hacked together from materials found at the local 7-Eleven. He had superglued bristles from a toothbrush onto a colored pencil and used it to poke the microbes around.ImageDr. Burns\u2019s bespoke colored pencil\/brush instrument.Credit...John BurnsThen, he whipped out a tool that made Dr. Willoughby gasp: a mouth pipette. Dr. Burns sucked on the end of a tube, like a straw, to separate the rare Paulinella specimens from the surrounding stew of life.\u201cOld school,\u201d Dr. Willoughby said. \u201cThis is like biology I don\u2019t do.\u201dAs Dr. Van Etten and Dr. Burns brought Dr. Willoughby up to speed on their field work so far, they described how some Paulinella were shorter and tended to be free-floating, while others were longer and stuck to plants. Dr. Willoughby made sketches as part of his scientific process and pulled out his laptop to start drawing.He noticed that the scales were overlapping one another in different directions \u2014 in one, they overlapped on top of each other in a clockwise pattern, and the other was in reverse.The fresh eyes of a person who hadn\u2019t been staring at Paulinella for hours identified a curious, distinctive trait. Were they looking at two different species?At the end of the weekend, Dr. Willoughby drove home and Dr. Van Etten and Dr. Burns road-tripped to his lab in Maine. There, they put the specimens into an electron microscope. The differences were stark under such high resolution.Their excitement grew \u2014 this quixotic scientific side project could actually yield new scientific knowledge.Dr. Van Etten viewing the Paulinella cell, imaged on an electron microscope at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine.Two new species come into focusAll plants on Earth contain plastids, a basic photosynthetic engine. And plastids can be traced back to that one event some 1.5 billion years ago, when a single-celled organism merged with a photosynthetic bacterium. In Paulinella, the photosynthetic engine is called a chromatophore \u2014 a once-free living bacterium that still has its own DNA.The team extracted that DNA and sent the samples to a lab in South Korea, led by Hwan Su Yoon, an evolutionary biologist at Sungkyunkwan University who previously discovered another species of Paulinella. He is also studying a potential new one he scooped up at a pond in his town.Dr. Yoon performed DNA sequencing and confirmed that these were, in fact, two new species.Studying more species of Paulinella can guide scientists like Dr. Yoon, who dreams of one day engineering a new photosynthetic organism \u2014 doing in a lab \u201cthe same trick nature has only pulled off twice,\u201d he said. It can also shed light on the fundamental question of how complex life developed on Earth.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cIt can teach us a lot,\u201d said Sergio Mu\u00f1oz-G\u00f3mez, an evolutionary biologist at Purdue University. Complex life on Earth emerged in part by stealing metabolic tricks from bacteria, exactly as Paulinella is doing, Dr. Mu\u00f1oz-G\u00f3mez said. \u201cSome people speculate that if you were to find complex life elsewhere in the universe, you would have something like\u201d this, he continued, where two organisms merged with mutual benefits.The problem is that those events happened so long ago that the molecular details \u2014 a complex choreography in which two independent life-forms became one in an intricate, step-by-step process of trading and losing genes \u2014 are shrouded in mystery. In Paulinella, an analogous process happened much more recently, allowing scientists to probe the details.Dr. Van Etten and Dr. Willoughby have already teamed up for the next stage of research, partnering with citizen scientists and hobbyists to try and discover even more species of Paulinella. The funding freeze that brought them together was temporary, and both of them were able to continue their research and get paid. But it underscored that science wasn\u2019t just a career path \u2014 but a way of life.\u201cWe\u2019ll always be doing this stuff; it\u2019s part of who I am,\u201d said Dr. Van Etten, who is setting her lab up at the University of Maryland this fall. \u201cMy little project here has big implications for evolutionary biology. Think of it: if more people were doing this, how many things we\u2019d be learning about the planet and our health and where we came from.\u201dImageDr. Van Etten at the sampling site in North Carolina.Credit...Julia van EttenAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
    "published_at": "2026-09-26T09:00:52+00:00",
    "author_name": "Carolyn Y. Johnson",
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