Brought together by Trump’s funding cuts, Julia Van Etten and her rag tag team of biologists pursued their research in a motel room.
And it was out of this makeshift lab that they made an incredible discovery: two new microscopic organisms that may be crucial to tracing the origins of life, the New York Times reports.
The organisms are an elusive single-celled microbe called Paulinella. Including the recent discovery, reported in a study in the Journal of Phycology, there are now just six known species of Paulinella in the world.
Scientists believe that Paulinella could provide a window into a crucial event in the development of complex life, when a single celled organism swallowed a photosynthetic bacterium and, instead of digesting it, repurposed it into its personal energy factory. Later, this fusion would evolve into the chloroplast cells that plants use to photosynthesize. It was because of this that life blossomed from glorified self-replicating particles floating in a fetid stew and into large, complex organisms.
