In an $80 Motel Room, Scientists Discover Two New Species That Could Explain the Origins of Complex Life
In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life
When federal funding freezes left scientists reeling, a group chat of 300 researchers sparked an unlikely collaboration. Evolutionary biologist Julia Van Etten turned a cheap North Carolina motel room into a makeshift lab, where she and colleagues discovered two new species of Paulinella, a rare microbe that independently evolved photosynthesis. The find, published in the Journal of Phycology, offers a rare window into how complex life on Earth began—and how it might be engineered.
It's really amazing to me. This represents the only other case right now of where this chance evolutionary event occurred.
- ouked
https://archive.is/2026.09.26-101638/https://www.nytimes.com...
- 2b3a51
> "He noticed that the scales were overlapping one another in different directions — 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’t been staring at Paulinella for hours identified a curious, distinctive trait. Were they looking at two different species?"
I found it reassuring that sketching what you see down the microscope is still part of a scientific practice. Also the 'fresh eyes' could perhaps point the way to a more collegiate organisation of research.
- alexpotato
> Dr. Van Etten didn’t expect much from the water she had scooped from a random dock next to the highway
There are stories of companies asking their employees to bring back soil and water samples from wherever the employees go on vacation.
The idea is that this is a somewhat random sampling of locations that the company wouldn't have thought of on their own. Plus, it's possible that one of the samples has some novel chemical or biological compound that could lead to a breakthrough discovery.
- staplung
If you have a decent microscope and want to work on some citizen science that's directly related to the research in this article: https://www.vanettenlab.org/paulinella-consortium
- chakintosh
Reading this article with a bittersweet feeling. This is exactly the kind of work I wanted to do for the rest of my life while in Biology class at uni 15 years ago. But I dropped out and ended up in a completely different field (Design). But I still have that fondness of Biology in me all these years later.