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.
That happened 1.5 billion years ago, and was long thought to be a singular event. But Paulinella, it turns out, experienced its own photosynthetic merger just 100 million years ago. Angela Oliverio, a biologist at Syracuse University, explained that the merging between the two organisms that comprise Paulinella still wasn’t complete, giving us a snapshot of this evolutionary process in action.
“It’s really amazing to me,” Oliverio told the NYT. This “represents the only other case right now of where this chance evolutionary event occurred.”
Van Etten, who led the work, became obsessed with Paulinella after serendipitously discovering one in a water sample she took while on vacation in North Carolina, a chance find the NYT likened to “finding a needle in a thousand haystacks.”
Soon, in an ironic twist, Van Etten would find other biologists to join her on her quest to find more the microbes after the Trump administration began wreaking havoc on scientific funding. She was personally impacted, locked out of her $60,000 fellowship from the National Science Foundation after Trump issued a memo freezing federal funding in 2025.
Eventually, the funds were restored, but in the intervening chaos, other scientists began seeking each other for advice and taking up their own ways of pursuing research outside an official laboratory.
Van Etten and her crew set one up in an $80 per night motel room, where, while studying Paulinella samples they collected, the researchers noticed that they were actually looking at two different species of the microbe. Their hunch was confirmed by DNA sequencing performed by a lab in South Korea.
It’s not the only example of scientists resorting to unorthodox measures to fund their research. A team of researchers studying marmots resorted to creating an OnlyFans account dedicated to marmot content after Trump axed their federal research grants.
More on biology: Scientists Say They’ve Found Remnants of Huge Life-Giving Continent Beneath Antarctica
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