The New York Times reports:

On a spring day last year, Andrew Willoughby drove three and a half hours to a cheap motel in Nags Head, N.C. From the parking lot, he texted a stranger he had met online.

Julia Van Etten appeared, ushering him past a “Do Not Disturb” sign into one of the motel’s $80 rooms, which she had secretly turned into a makeshift lab. Jugs of brackish water lined the walls. Buckets overflowed with hunks of marsh grass. Bedside tables served as microscope stands.

“Oh my god, these people are legit,” Dr. Willoughby, a biologist who studies plant genomes, thought to himself as he found a spot to sit on the corner of the bed.

Over the next few days, a small group of scientists led by Dr. Van Etten, an evolutionary biologist, scoured drops of water for swamp algae. The team — brought together, in part, by disruptions and despair over the Trump administration’s freezes to federal science funding — then made an exciting discovery.

In the Journal of Phycology, Dr. Van Etten and her colleagues describe their motel-room find: two new species of a single-celled organism called Paulinella, a scaly, grenade-shaped microbe with sausage-shaped green lumps inside. Their discovery brings the world’s known total of photosynthetic Paulinella species to six.

What makes Paulinella important to biologists? Almost all complex photosynthetic life on Earth, from redwood trees to ferns to algae, traces back to an event 1.5 billion years ago. That’s when a single-celled organism engulfed a photosynthetic bacterium, turning it into a kind of energy-generating packet — what scientists call an “organelle.” But two decades ago, biologists discovered that this photosynthetic merger had happened a second time, in Paulinella, about 100 million years ago.

Because it happened so recently, evolutionarily speaking, Paulinella’s biology might offer a window into that first, improbably profound event: the moment when the planet began to bloom, becoming an oasis for life in the vast, dark emptiness of space. [Continue reading…]