NYT reported an important discovery for understanding the origin of life in a motel

American scientists have found two new species of single-celled organism genus Paulinella. Important to understanding the origin of life on Earth, they made the discovery in a laboratory equipped in a room of a motel with a cost of $ 80 per night, reported The New York Times (NYT).

The species were named Paulinella marae and Paulinella murrayi.

Paulinella is a genus of shell amoebas. This organism is unique in that it represents the second known case in the history of the Earth, when a single-celled organism absorbed a photosynthetic bacterium and turned it into a chromatophor, the part of the cell in which the process of photosynthesis takes place.

Before its discovery, scientists believed that almost all complex photosynthetic life on Earth dates back to a common ancestor that occurred about 1.6 billion years ago. In Paulinella, this happened about 100 million years ago — recently from an evolutionary point of view. This allows biologists to observe the emergence of a new complex life in real time.

The group included Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Research Fellow Dr. Julia Van Etten, Duke University Research Fellow Dr. Andrew Willoughby and John Burns, Senior Research Fellow at the Bigelow Oceanology Laboratory.

In the first half of 2025, they, like many researchers in the U.S., faced with the denial of funding for their projects because of the policies of the administration of President Donald Trump, who then recently returned to the White House. Dr. Van Etten was left without a National Science Foundation scholarship of $60,000 a year.

In the spring of the same year, Van Etten invited Willoughby to her makeshift laboratory in Nags Head, North Carolina. The team built some tools from improvised means. For example, as a bacteriological needle, Willoughby used a pencil with a toothbrush glued to the tip.

By that time, scientists already had several samples of Paulinella from a reservoir in North Carolina, from which Van Etten took water for analysis for four years. During his research, Willoughby noticed that the scales in some cells overlapped each other in different directions – in one case they overlapped each other clockwise, and in the other – in the opposite direction.

Assuming that this trait could indicate specific cell differences, the scientists drove to a lab in Maine. There, they placed samples in an electron microscope, where they also saw differences between organisms from different fences.

The scientists extracted DNA from the chromatophores of these cells and sent samples to a lab in South Korea led by Hwang Soo Yun, an evolutionary biologist at Songkyunkwan University who had previously discovered another species of the genus Paulinella. He confirmed that we are talking about two new species.