Van Etten Team Finds 2 New Paulinella Species in $80 Motel Lab

1 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Sep 26

Two newly identified Paulinella species, described in the Journal of Phycology, were found by Julia Van Etten’s team in a makeshift lab set up inside an $80 motel room in Nags Head, North Carolina.
The find raises the known number of photosynthetic Paulinella species to six, giving researchers fresh material to study a rare lineage that can illuminate how complex life evolved.
Andrew Willoughby and other scientists spent days scanning drops of brackish marsh water and grass samples under microscopes balanced on motel furniture to isolate the single-celled microbes.
Trump administration freezes on federal science funding helped push the researchers toward the improvised field setup, turning a low-budget motel room into the site of a notable evolutionary biology discovery.

Sources

What evolutionary secrets are hiding inside a microscopic, grenade-shaped cell recently pulled from a North Carolina swamp?

Could a sudden funding freeze actually accelerate our understanding of how ancient microbes transformed the Earth's atmosphere?

1 total