I. Ruiz-Trillo, has been awarded a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), for the Project entitled " Unravelling the unicellular prehistory of metazoans with functional analyses and single-cell genomics " The grant amounts to 1.967.535,00 euros for a 5-year Project starting 2014. Ruiz-Trillo leads the Multicell Genomes lab at IBE and  is one of the 20 researchers awarded with this grant in Spain and of the 312 selected throughout Europe, with a total inversion of 575 M€. The objective of the project is to understand the genetic mechanisms involved in the origin of animal multicellularity. In particular, the project aims to unravel the function of some proteins key to multicellularity present in the closest unicelular relatives of animals.