In this week’s issue of Science, research led by investigators at the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute examines the organismal complexity of the multicellular green alga Volvox carteri. Simon Prochnik et al. sequenced the Volvox genome to 11.1-fold coverage using a whole-genome shotgun approach; when compared to Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, its unicellular relative, the team found that “the two species have similar protein-coding potentials and few species-specific protein-coding gene predictions.” The authors suggest that “increases in organismal complexity can be associated with modifications of lineage-specific proteins rather than large-scale invention of protein-coding capacity.”
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