Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet MoCEGS (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In the energy market, uncertainty shocks such as price fluctuations and policy changes often occur, resulting in top-down negative effects to energy consumers. To promote a more robust, efficient and sustainable European energy economy, the MoCEGS project proposes a multi-level top-down energy planning approach incorporating data-driven process integration, process network analysis and chemometrics as core components. MoCEGS project aims to optimize energy trading, improve system circularity, mitigate uncertainty shocks, and exploit chemical utilization via a unique energy planning framework. The difficulty of developing such a modelling framework is the necessary computational resources and the multidisciplinary expertise involved. The MoCEGS project is planned with high-performance computational facilities and multi-disciplinary training, which also includes a secondment to a different European country. The advantage of proposed approach is that computational time is reduced and also enables high data-resolution. This approach also converts the traditionally linear economy consideration to circular economy consideration via multi-level process integration. The ultimate goal is to link collaborative minds of cross-disciplinary researchers in developing an integrative energy planning framework that will be widely-used to promote energy circularity, address epistemic uncertainty and achieve regional sustainability.

Mots clés : energy system analysis, process network synthesis, energy transition, chemometrics

Participants :
- Université Radboud de Nimègue (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 203464.32 €
- Université István Széchenyi (Hongrie) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet CosMechNuclides (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Mountain topography embeds a signal of past climate-driven erosion and tectonic evolution. Numerical models are powerful tools to characterize this delicate interplay and outputs can be used as a framework to understand the current climate or forecast future fault behavior and earthquakes. To validate models of climate and tectonic interactions during mountain building requires high-resolution records of erosion rates, sedimentation rates, climate variability, and fault activity. However, sites with detailed Quaternary records of all these variables are rare, which hinders our ability to validate model outputs. A multi-system approach, using field data to calibrate models, is required to enhance the predictive power of models and their capacity to tackle major unresolved tectonic and climatic problems, like how climate-enhanced erosion affects rates of faulting. This project will: 1) develop cutting-edge, data-driven, geomechanical models that integrate tectonics, climate, and erosion during mountain building; 2) collect new field data (10Be boulder ages and high-resolution topographic data) to generate a high-resolution record of Quaternary fault activity in the Andean foreland and supplement this data with existing erosion rates, rock exhumation rates, and sedimentation records; and 3) calibrate and apply the models using the field data to quantify the extent that climate-driven erosion affects rates of tectonic processes. This project will push the boundaries of our understanding of how tectonic and climatic variables influence landscape evolution whilst developing data-driven geomechanical modelling techniques with powerful applications to widespread tectonic, climatic, and sedimentological processes. The project will also give the researcher experience in a pioneering modelling field, whilst fostering intra-European and global collaborations and helping the researcher achieve their career goal of becoming an independent academic in Europe.

Mots clés : active tectonics, climate and tectonics, landscape evolution modelling, geodynamic modelling, cosmogenic nuclides, topographic analysis, fault scarps, geomorphology

Participants :
- GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 173847.36 €
Projet MARMOTTE (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

This year has seen a breakthrough in structural bioinformatics - deep learning-based methods, most notably Google DeepMind's AlphaFold2, have demonstrated near-experimental accuracy of protein structure predictions. However, even the best protein structure prediction methods do not automatically provide knowledge about protein dynamics and protein interactions, which is often essential to understand or predict the biological functions of proteins. Those functions are performed via intermolecular interactions, and such interactions almost always involve conformational changes of engaged partners. The problem of modeling dynamic protein structures and their complexes is still largely unsolved - this project aims to significantly contribute towards its future solution by exploring the link between computational geometry, statistical physics, and machine learning. The postdoctoral researcher will develop novel methods that: given a dynamic (moving) molecular structure, efficiently compute tessellation-derived contact areas; given a starting structure and its tessellation-derived contacts areas, predict (using a graph neural network) how the interatomic contact areas will change upon motion; given a protein complex model generated by docking, use the predicted statistical properties of the contact areas to estimate (using a graph neural network) the protein-protein binding energy score. If successfully developed, such methods will provide unique data about the dynamics of tessellation-derived interatomic contact areas. Most importantly, they will provide effective dynamics-aware scores for assessing and ranking structural models of protein complexes.

Mots clés : protein dynamics, protein complexes, voronoi tessellation of 3d balls, atom atom contacts, entropy prediction, graph neural networks, molecular structure, protein docking

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 195914.88 €
- École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (Suisse) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet SENQET (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

SENQET aims to develop an advanced class of highly sensitive and selective plasmonic sensors based on quantum electron transfer phenomenon on optical fibre and chip platforms for detection of analytes down to picomolar concentrations. Its uniqueness lies in introducing an immobilization protocol loaded with several novel features for immobilizing metal nanoparticles on end facet of an optical fibre to fabricate the sensing probe, which besides being reproducible also enables monitoring of the fabrication process in real time, thus providing feasibility for batch fabrication of sensors. Through a synergistic nexus of quantum electron transfer phenomenon with optical fibre technology, SENQET aims to develop nanospectroscopic sensors for point-of-care applications in areas as diverse as environmental monitoring and disease diagnostics. While the quantum electron transfer effect imparts the sensor with excellent selectivity and hypersensitivity, use of an optical fibre for its implementation makes the sensor compact, easy to interrogate, and safe to use. This innovative and well-structured project will categorically produce many significant research outputs that will advance the knowledge on plasmonic sensors and give visibility to and promote the European research in this field. It will contribute towards establishing a cost-effective sensing technology and will bring about significant improvements in healthcare. Concurrently, the research and transferable skills to be acquired by the Fellow, including industrially relevant and entrepreneurial competences will immensely enhance his scientific expertise besides making him qualify as a highly skilled professional to establish his own research group in a leading European institute/university. Unequivocally, SENQET is expected to bring a breakthrough in optical sensor technology and contribute to develop new sensing technologies that can have broad positive impact in Europe and globally.

Mots clés : optical fibre sensors plasmonic sensors biosensors

Participants :
- Fox biosystems nv (Belgique) — Partner, associated partner, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 0.0 €
- Université du Pays basque (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 165312.96 €
- École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (Suisse) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet FTMVAJ (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

This project, entitled Fighting Talk: Motivating Violence in Ancient Judaism, will examine examples of pre-battle speeches recorded in ancient Jewish literature, to determine how such speeches reflect forms of motivation to violence within Judaism, how such speeches draw from and respond to other literary templates, and to further explore the relationship between literary representations of pre-battle exhortations and their oral counterparts. The principal goal of FTMVAJ is to gather and analyse a comprehensive group of ancient Jewish pre-battle exhortations, using appropriate methodological considerations including but not limited to linguistic analysis, role of violence in the speech, actions anticipated following the speech, the identity of the speaker and audience both within the narrative and as a literary work, and intertextuality. Additionally, I will create a suitable framework for understanding these collected speeches and explicate common features. These features will be further compared with Greek and Roman counterparts to examine the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish examples of ancient pre-battle speech. The project’s goals will be measured by the following deliverables: academic publications, dissemination and communication activities. The research is of significance to several academic fields and has importance for public understanding of differences in core motivations between ethnic and religious groups, and furthermore, any who employ biblical texts to incite collective violence. FTMVAJ also has significant contributions to make for modern contexts, wherein holy texts are used to justify imagined and real violence.

Mots clés : jewish studies

Participants :
- Université d'Agder (Norvège) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 226751.04 €
Projet KHEALTH (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

KHEALTH will unlock the potential of kefiran, an exopolysaccharide (EPS) from kefir grains, a symbiotic microbial community used as a starter culture to produce the fermented beverage kefir. Thanks to recent scientific evidence of its health benefits, the popularity of kefir is rising, especially post-COVID-19. Although many studies document the health benefits of consuming kefir, the health-related attributes of kefiran have not been extensively studied. Kefiran is an EPS composed of D-glucose and D-galactose whose structure and bioactivities are strictly related to the producing microbial strain. Despite the general lack of research, preliminary studies of EPS from lactic acid bacteria show promising bioactivities such as antimicrobial and prebiotic effects. KHEALTH will screen ~200 strains from the kefir collection of Teagasc Food Research Centre to identify high-yield kefiran producers, followed by in vitro/ex vivo assays to assess bioactivities (e.g., antimicrobial, antioxidant, prebiotic, cholesterol-lowering). Structural analysis of kefiran will correlate with its bioactivities, filling knowledge gaps relating to EPS structure-function relationships. The project will proceed to develop scalable kefiran production strategies, including the exploitation of dairy industry by-products as fermentation substrates for kefiran production, thereby aligning with the EU's Circular Economy Action Plan. Genetic engineering approaches will be applied to further investigate approaches to enhance kefiran production. KHEALTH will also involve an in vivo animal study of kefiran's health benefits, with the final aim of harnessing its health-promoting potential. A comprehensive Dissemination, Exploitation & Communication plan will ensure the findings reach both the scientific community and society. The implementation of KHEALTH will also greatly contribute to the career development of the researcher in academia through implementation of a detailed Career Development Plan.

Mots clés : kefir, exopolysaccharide, kefiran, bioactivities, yield optimization

Participants :
- Teagasc (Irlande) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 252728.64 €
Projet NovelPBC (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Today, there is a considerable desire to consume sustainable products due to healthy and ethical reasons, environmental sustainability, and issues related to greenhouse gas emissions. Ireland now specializes in producing beef, lamb, and dairy—which are the most emission-intensive foods—but plans to cut greenhouse emissions (50%) by 2030 and reach net zero emissions by 2050. Cheese manufacturing consumes significant quantities of energy (4.9-8.9 MJ/kg) and the study on the novel dairy-free cheeses has gained high interest due to the new opportunities offered by the worldwide market where it is predicted to rise to 3.90 billion USD by 2024. The dairy-free industry faces major challenges to formulate dairy-free cheeses with excellent nutritional properties, functionality, flavour, and texture—compared with the dairy-based cheeses. This study proposes to evaluate and manipulate interactions of plant proteins/carbohydrates/relevant ingredients through food material science, aiming to design an innovative dairy-free cheese with similar physicochemical, rheological, and sensory properties to the dairy-based cheese. This project will be carried out during a 2-year period at Teagasc with a 3-month secondment in University College Cork. Firstly, the physico-chemical interactions, structures and functional properties of materials will be studied and the most appropriate materials and their ranges will be determined (WP1). After producing some prototypes of dairy-free cheeses, the properties of them will be determined (WP2), and then, formulation(s) will be optimized (WP3). Finally, the quality of the optimized sample will be compared with commercially available cheeses (WP4). Results of this study will contribute to the industrial/sustainable production of dairy-free cheeses; thus, it will provide food security, sustainable lifestyles, and consumption patterns in alignment with current Teagasc goals, Horizon 2022, EU, and Irish government research initiatives.

Mots clés : dairy free cheese structures formulation plant proteins bioactive compound rheological properties, physicochemical properties

Participants :
- University College Cork (Irlande) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Teagasc (Irlande) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 199694.4 €
Projet DEAR-Waste (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Environmental antibiotic resistance is a major threat to human and veterinary health and a key issue addressed by the European One Health Action Plan Against Antimicrobial Resistance. City sewers shelter rich and diverse bacterial communities that are continuously exposed to antibiotic residues from human excreta, thus becoming a reservoir of resistance. Predicting the risk of antibiotic resistance evolution in city sewers requires a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics and evolution of wastewater bacterial communities faced to such exposition. However, sewers are complex environments and contain multiple abiotic factors, which may act in non-additive ways. In addition, interactions between species within communities affect growth and consequently competition, through both density- and frequency-dependent processes. By changing the competitive ability of variants, such as antibiotic resistant phenotypes, interspecies interactions also change evolutionary processes. DEAR-Waste aims at understanding the dynamics of communities and antibiotic resistance evolution in city sewers, together with establishing wastewater as a model system for fundamental studies on community dynamics and evolution. DEAR-Waste adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining high-throughput sequencing technologies, environmental chemistry, microbial ecology and evolution, time-series statistical analysis, and formal modelling. Data from synthetic mesocosms will parametrize the Hutchinsonian niche for population in communities: a tolerance curve mapping species performance onto a complex environmental space defined by the multidimensional abiotic environment and species interactions. Predictions from these curves will be tested against field measurements of microbial and chemical dynamics sampled in city sewers. An evolutionary experiment in similar mesocosms will finally quantify how environmental complexity and interspecies interactions modulate the evolution of antibiotic resistance.

Mots clés : flow cytometry, lc ms ms

Participants :
- CERCA Institution (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 181152.96 €
Projet REI_MSMD (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Mendelian susceptibility to mycobacterial disease (MSMD) is characterized by severe infections with weakly virulent mycobacteria in otherwise healthy patients. All known 31 genetic etiologies are inborn errors of interferon gamma (IFN-g) immunity and collectively account for about half of the cases. We discovered private, hemizygous, predicted loss- of-function (pLOF) mutations in the X-linked ribosome recycling and reinitiation factor MCTS1 gene in five unrelated MSMD male patients. The connection with MSMD is surprising, because the MCTS1 protein is typically thought to be involved in housekeeping of translation machinery and translational control of gene expression. Although the genetic evidence alone is compelling, we propose to further prove causality by discovering the molecular and cellular mechanism by which MCTS1 deficiency underlies MSMD. This project will hence help to better understand the previously unappreciated connection between regulation of translation reinitiation and IFN-g immunity. The Casanova Group has worked on MSMD for more than 25 years and identified most inborn errors of IFN-g immunity. I have spent my PhD working on the basic molecular mechanism of MCTS1. I am therefore a highly suitable candidate to join the Casanova group and to work on this project.

Mots clés : mcts1, denr, reinitiation, translation, msmd, mycobacterial disease, interferon, immunity, infection, genetics

Participants :
- Institut des maladies génétiques (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 211754.88 €
Projet MUSHEUM (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Museum collections and other repositories contain a vast amount of specimens associated with metadata detailing the location, habitat and ecological observations of the specimen at the moment of collection. Since these specimens are biological tissues, DNA sequencing techniques can be used to study them. However, their application to fungi is still very limited. One of such applications is population genomics, a field where fungal study is also severely lagging behind that of plants and animals. The combination of sequences from museum specimens and fresh material will allow us to study populations of two mushroom-forming fungi, Trichaptum abietinum and Phelopillus nigrolimitatus. T. abietinum is an abundant species that is emerging as a model for population studies, with abundant information in Scandinavia. Museum samples will allow us to detect potential changes in selective forces that have affected Norwegian populations, mainly associated with landscape changes over the XXth century. P. nigrolimitatus is a Scandinavian Nearly Threatened species whose populations have been dwindling in association to land use changes. Museum samples will allow us to compare past and current genetic diversity of Norwegian populations, which will help inform conservation efforts. The project will generate SNP chips, which will help future population and conservation studies by providing a reliable and cost-efficient analytical tool. MUSHEUM will combine population genomic data with specimen metadata and ecological information to study selective pressures in the two species. Finally, MUSHEUM will make use of the combined genome skimming data generated for the design of SNP probes to generate de novo genome assemblies of the two species. This advances will allow to repurpose data from population studies for the generation of reference assemblies.

Mots clés : mycology, population genomics, museomics

Participants :
- Université d'Oslo (Norvège) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 226751.04 €
- Biofokus (Norvège) — Partner, associated partner, Recherche, subvention : 0.0 €