Rag Tag Team of Biologists Who Lost Funding Because of Trump Turned a Motel Room into Makeshift Lab and Made a Groundbreaking Discovery
Talk about resourcefulness. The post Rag Tag Team of Biologists Who Lost Funding Because of Trump Turned a Motel Room into Makeshift Lab and Made a Groundbreaking Discovery appeared first on Futurism .
Julia Van Etten and her team of biologists, united by Trump's funding cuts, transformed a motel room into a makeshift laboratory, leading to a groundbreaking discovery. This unconventional lab yielded two new microscopic organisms, a crucial finding in understanding the origins of life. The team's discovery of Paulinella, a single-celled microbe, brought the total known species of this organism to six.
The discovery of these new species sheds light on a significant event in the evolution of complex life, when a single-celled organism swallowed a photosynthetic bacterium and repurposed it as its personal energy factory. This fusion eventually evolved into chloroplast cells found in plant cells, enabling photosynthesis. Researchers now believe Paulinella experienced a similar photosynthetic merger just 100 million years ago, providing a snapshot of this evolutionary process in action.
Angela Oliverio, a biologist at Syracuse University, called this finding "amazing" as it represents the only other case of such an event. Van Etten, who discovered Paulinella while on vacation, became determined to find more microbes, relying on serendipity and collaboration after Trump's administration disrupted scientific funding.
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