Maria Eleonora Rossi

Independent origins of spicules reconcile palaeontological and molecular evidence of the evolutionary history of sponges

The paper reconciles molecular and fossil evidence by showing sponges emerged in the early Ediacaran without spicules, which evolved independently multiple times later.

The Hydractinia cell atlas reveals cellular and molecular principles of cnidarian coloniality

The paper constructs a Hydractinia cell atlas to study the cellular and molecular mechanisms of coloniality, finding that distinct colony parts are defined by combinations of shared cell types and rare innovations.

Trimitomics: An efficient pipeline for mitochondrial assembly from transcriptomic reads in non-model species

The paper introduces a pipeline for efficiently assembling mitochondrial genomes from transcriptomic reads in non-model species, demonstrating its effectiveness across diverse invertebrates.