In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life

While the research about Paulinella is very interesting, it has no relationship whatsoever with "the origins of life".

What this research is about is the origin of plants, which are indeed one of the most important forms of life, but the origin of plants is distant by billions of years from the origin of life and it is even distant by billions of years from the origin of phototrophy (frequently, but not really correctly, called "photosynthesis", i.e. the extraction of energy from solar light).

The ancestor of red algae and green algae (the terrestrial plants are descended from green algae) has been created by the hybridization through symbiosis between a unicellular eukaryote (i.e. nucleated cell) and a cyanobacterium, a.k.a. blue-green alga.

As explained in TFA, Paulinella is the second case of such a symbiosis between a nucleated cell and a cyanobacterium, which happened relatively recently, unlike the symbiosis from the origin of plants, which happened about a billion and a half years ago.

Because Paulinella and its internal symbionts have not been modified so profoundly by symbiosis like the red algae or green algae, it can provide information about how the early stages of the hybridization happened, eventually allowing a better understanding of how plants function.

> "He noticed that the scales were overlapping one another in different directions — in one, they overlapped on top of each other in a clockwise pattern, and the other was in reverse. The fresh eyes of a person who hadn’t been staring at Paulinella for hours identified a curious, distinctive trait. Were they looking at two different species?"

I found it reassuring that sketching what you see down the microscope is still part of a scientific practice. Also the 'fresh eyes' could perhaps point the way to a more collegiate organisation of research.

> Dr. Van Etten didn’t expect much from the water she had scooped from a random dock next to the highway

There are stories of companies asking their employees to bring back soil and water samples from wherever the employees go on vacation.

The idea is that this is a somewhat random sampling of locations that the company wouldn't have thought of on their own. Plus, it's possible that one of the samples has some novel chemical or biological compound that could lead to a breakthrough discovery.

If you have a decent microscope and want to work on some citizen science that's directly related to the research in this article: https://www.vanettenlab.org/paulinella-consortium

Reading this article with a bittersweet feeling. This is exactly the kind of work I wanted to do for the rest of my life while in Biology class at uni 15 years ago. But I dropped out and ended up in a completely different field (Design). But I still have that fondness of Biology in me all these years later.

Maybe I'm getting old but man, motel rooms run $80 now?

>"The first species of Paulinella was discovered on Dec. 24, 1894, in the sediments of a backwater of the Rhine River by the German biologist Robert Lauterborn. He named the genus after his stepmother, Pauline."

How can they say this without providing more background?

this revives my recurring desire to get a good USB microscope. Good, to me, in this context:

a few hundred bucks

able to look at microbes

also able to look at less micro level stuff, like maybe the thing i'm trying to solder or fix

is it wrong to solicit comments/recommendations here?

They mention this event has only happened handful of times.

This seems unsupported. More likely is it's happened a large number of times, but has only established a lineage a handful of times.

Once a scientist, always a scientist.

Great reporting - reading this NYT article gives me a little bit of the excitement that I normally only get from reading Quanta Magazine.

I wonder what the author thinks steampunk means

I have an idea on how life could originate in a motel room :D

Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/science/motel-science-dis...

This was also interesting: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01046-z

You have been blocked from The New York Times because we suspect that you're a robot.

wtf is happening to internet these days...

All they needed was a blue UV light

I don't know what I should've expected, but I am a bit disappointed that they in fact did not find these organisms in the motel room.

I thought they use built up gunk from years in the bathroom to discover new species, so they choose a cheap motel.

Quoting the article:

"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."

Apparently this is the new way of life for Scientists under the Trump regime.

Sad.

Why did they work in a motel room? The article kinda implies it had something to do with Trump’s funding cuts, but unless I missed something the connection wasn’t made explicit.

non-paywall (perm): https://archive.ph/QpBF1

"Trump administration’s freezes to federal science"

Nytimes can't help itself. love it.

I just stayed in an $80 motel room myself and I also think I might have also discovered a new form of life in the showers.

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So $80 is considered a "cheap room"? How is a person supposed to earn $80 a day to pay for it and have something left?

Also, cells can have scales? Amazing.