A group of New York researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) discovered a new species of microscopic green algae. Reseachers struggled to come up with a suitable name for their discovery until they remembered an inspiring speech.

After recalling her inspirational poem, The Hill We Climb, at President Biden’s inauguration, researchers named the new algae finding after National Youth Poet Amanda Gorman.

“At a point when it was sometimes difficult to find meaning in our research, Amanda Gorman gifted us with this incredibly uplifting poem that gave us a renewed sense of hope in the lab,” Dr. Fay-Wei Li, assistant professor at BTI, said in a press release.

Tanner Robison, a graduate student, working at Dr. Li’s lab, named the late algae discovery after Gorman. 

“It was just a really great poem. It wasn’t a political thing; it was just a really great poem. It was about rising above challenges, and we had had a very challenging year,” Robison said.

Researchers dubbed the new species Gormaniella terricola. The algae discovery began in the mix of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Jan. 6 ambush at the United States Capitol. 

The new algae species was discovered by accident after Jessica Nelson researched hornwort plants searching for symbiotic cyanobacteria, best described in a recent report in the American Journal of Botany. 

Originally, algae weren’t the center focus of the investigation.

“It would have been easy to just call it contamination and throw it out, but curiosity drove us to take a closer look,” Robinson said. “We discovered a new species by accident, basically by just paying attention to what we were looking at. I think we could learn a lot more things by just paying more attention.” 

The team also sequenced the mitochondrial genome of Gormaniella terricola, which contains some fungal DNA. The nuclear genome of the alga is currently being sequenced.

The National Science Foundation provided funding for this research.

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