In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life

Working from a North Carolina motel room last year, a small team led by University of Maryland biologist Julia Van Etten found two new species of Paulinella, a rare amoeba that photosynthesizes with a bacterium its ancestors swallowed. It is one of the few organisms known to have turned a captured bacterium into a permanent organelle, the step that long ago gave plants and algae their chloroplasts.

The find bears on how cells first gained photosynthetic organelles, not on the origin of life itself, and lab cultures of the two species are only now being started.