Our paper on gene loss during the transition to multicellularity is available on BioRxiv. Here we show that as the volvocines gain biological and developmental complexity that they are losing more genes than they gain. Importantly, the result of this appear to be that their protein interaction networks are altered to do this. This was a large multi year effort led by PhD student Bereníce Jimenez-Marín and included several undergraduate researchers and collaboration with Tom Platt’s lab. It is currently under revision after peer review.
Volvocales – Losing genes, gaining complexity
The Olson Lab 