GAEA builds on the model published in De Lucia & Blaizot (2007), but many prescriptions have been updated significantly over the past years. In particular, GAEA features:

(i) a detailed treatment of chemical enrichment accounting finite stellar life-times and differential chemical yields (De Lucia et al. 2014);
(ii) a stellar feedback scheme partially based on results from hydro-dynamical simulations (Hirschmann et al. 2016);
(iii) a specific treatment for angular momentum exchanges between galactic components, and prescriptions to partition the cold gas into its molecular (star forming) and atomic components (Xie et al. 2017);
(iv) theoretical prescriptions for variations of the stellar Initial Mass Function (Fontanot et al. 2017; Fontanot et al. 2018).

Our reference model reproduces a number of important observational measurements including: the evolution of the galaxy stellar mass function up to z~7 and the cosmic star formation rate density up to z~10 (Fontanot et al. 2017); the measured correlation between stellar mass/luminosity and metal content of galaxies in the local Universe, donw to the scale of Milky Way satellites (De Lucia et al. 2014; Xie et al. 2017), and the evolution of the galaxy mass-gas metallicity relation up to z~2 (Hirschmann et al. 2016; Xie et al. 2017); the size-mass relation and the specific angular momentum-mass relation of late and early-type galaxies in the local Universe (Zoldan et al. 2018); the quiescent satellite fraction in the local Universe (De Lucia et al. 2019).