On a spring day last year, Andrew Willoughby drove three and a half hours to a cheap motel in Nags Head, North Carolina, texted a stranger from the parking lot, and was led past a “Do Not Disturb” sign into an $80 room that had been quietly converted into a laboratory. Jugs of brackish water lined the walls. Buckets of marsh grass overflowed. The bedside tables were microscope stands. “Oh my god, these people are legit,” thought Dr. Willoughby, a plant-genome biologist, taking a seat on the corner of the bed, according to the New York Times’s account of the expedition.
The room’s proprietor was Julia Van Etten, an evolutionary biologist, and the motel was her field station. Out of it, her team has now described, in the Journal of Phycology, two new species of Paulinella — a scaly, grenade-shaped single-celled microbe carrying sausage-shaped green lumps inside. That brings the world’s tally of known photosynthetic Paulinella species to six, which sounds like a niche achievement until you know what Paulinella is.
Almost all complex photosynthetic life — redwoods, ferns, algae, your houseplants — descends from a single event about 1.5 billion years ago, when one cell swallowed a photosynthetic bacterium and, instead of digesting it, kept it as an energy-generating organelle. Biologists long assumed this happened exactly once. Then, in 2005, genetic analysis showed it had happened again, in Paulinella, only about 100 million years ago. Because that second merger is recent and still incomplete, Paulinella is a snapshot of the process mid-way: evolution caught in the act. “It’s really amazing to me,” Angela Oliverio, a Syracuse University biologist uninvolved in the study, told the Times. This “represents the only other case right now of where this chance evolutionary event occurred.” The hope is practical as well as cosmological: understand the merger and you might learn to engineer photosynthetic organisms from scratch.
A needle in a thousand haystacks
Paulinella does not want to be found. The first species turned up on December 24, 1894, in the sediment of a Rhine backwater, collected by the German biologist Robert Lauterborn, who named the genus after his stepmother, Pauline. In the two decades since its significance was recognized, scientists had documented only three other species. It is scarce in any water sample, tiny, and reluctant to grow in a lab. “No graduate student wants to work on an organism that takes four to five days to double — you’ll get that Ph.D. in 10 years,” Arthur Grossman, a plant biologist at Carnegie Science, told the Times.
Dr. Van Etten found her first Paulinella cell the hard way: stuck at home on a rainy family vacation in North Carolina, while a graduate student at Rutgers and a self-described “couch microscopist” hunched over a $300 microscope on her sofa. Her mother told her to go outside and take some samples. In water scooped from a random dock by the highway, among yellowish-brown plankton, she spotted a small green dot, zoomed in, shrieked, and texted her doctoral adviser: “OMG.”
Confirming the find took four more years of sampling trips. The decisive one came in 2025, under strange circumstances. A week after President Trump’s January inauguration, the White House budget office froze federal funding pending review for programs conflicting with new priorities. The National Science Foundation took its payment system offline, and Dr. Van Etten — then a research fellow at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution — was locked out of her $60,000-a-year NSF fellowship. She kept working unpaid. A group chat of roughly 300 early-career scientists, previously used for tax advice, became a lifeline; when she posted that she was having a bad time, Dr. Willoughby appeared in her DMs. A judge intervened, the administration rescinded the memo, and payments resumed about a week later — though some grants were cancelled as “not aligned with program goals.” The freeze thawed; the collaboration it forced did not.
So last spring Dr. Willoughby squeezed into the motel alongside Dr. Van Etten and John Burns, a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. Dr. Burns improvised instruments from the local 7-Eleven — toothbrush bristles superglued to a colored pencil for nudging microbes — and then produced the tool that made Dr. Willoughby gasp: a mouth pipette, used like a straw to suck rare Paulinella cells out of the stew. “Old school,” Dr. Willoughby said. “This is like biology I don’t do.” One Hacker News reader, 2b3a51, quoting the Times, noted approvingly that a fresh pair of eyes at the microscope noticed the organisms’ scales overlapped clockwise in one specimen and in reverse in another — the trait that suggested two species, not one.
A caveat deserves the last word. The Times headlines this as shedding light on “the origins of life,” and Hacker News commenter adrian_b objected that the research “has no relationship whatsoever with ‘the origins of life.’” He has a point: the swallowing of the bacterium that invented plant-type photosynthesis happened billions of years after life began. What the motel team is illuminating is the origin of the green half of the living world — weeds, wheat, redwoods — which is a smaller claim, and also entirely sufficient.