The very next sentence in the comment begins "What this research is about is the origin of plants, which are indeed one of the most important forms of life..."

There were several jumps in complexity, this is only one of them.

The first jump in complexity was the appearance of the eukaryotes, a.k.a. nucleated cells, which also happened through hybridization through symbiosis of different kinds of cells.

The event discussed in TFA was the second jump in complexity.

After the ancestor of the red algae and green alga was created by the hybridization of an eukaryote with a cyanobacterium, eventually the cyanobacterium was reduced to a smaller cellular component named chloroplast, which is the site where solar light is captured, and a big part of its DNA has migrated into the nucleus, where it fused with the DNA of the eukaryote host.

Probably after a few hundred million years after the hybridization event, and after the descendants have split into red algae and green algae (the former are adapted to deeper water, which is not reached by the reddish part of the solar light, while the latter are adapted to shallow water with strong light, which enabled them to also spread on the continents, in freshwater), both red algae and green algae evolved multi-cellular forms, which was the next step in increasing complexity.

There is evidence of multi-cellular red algae and green algae from slightly more than a billion years ago. These are the most ancient living beings whose kind can be identified with certainty, because for most unicellular living beings identification is not possible without checking for features that are not preserved in fossils.

The multi-cellular animals, which brought another jump in complexity, appeared only a few hundred million years after the red algae and green algae, in a world where there was a surplus of food from the activity of the abundant algae.

Perhaps they only offer insights in to the origins of a major branch of clickbait.

at best it's related to origins of eucaryotic life, but definitely not whole life in general

we basically uncovered early network sending unencrypted html, and you expect to understand how compiler works - simply different levels of abstraction

Of course that's a whole discussion but perhaps in the $300 range. Sounds like that's what Dr. Van Etten herself was using when she first found one.

She actually made some specific recommendations on the microscopy sub-reddit but they're a bit pricier ($425+). (scroll to last comment by Jay211TF):

https://www.reddit.com/r/microscopy/comments/1dhagyr/entry_l...

In one of the papers:

The samples were transported to the lab and observed at 100 to 400X magnification using an inverted microscope (IX51, Olympus, Tokyo, Japan).

A source for inexpensive high-quality equipment of questionable working order is whatever auction site your local hospital system uses to dispose of excess equipment.

+1 on this question, without any snark intended. What's a good, not too expensive beginner's microscope that's capable of this kind of citizen research (and other fun stuff)?

Same! Ready to send random samples from Sheffield