Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet PopMet (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Recent advances in metagenomics have revealed considerable genetic variation among the microbes that populate the human gut. It has been shown that multiple strains of a bacterial species can coexist in a microbial community. However, accurately differentiating strains in metagenomic samples is mostly not possible, even though pathogenicity is usually strain specific. Therefore, I propose to utilize single nucleotide variants (SNVs) to (i) identify and delineate bacterial strains and to (ii) reconstruct single strain genomes. As more than 1,000 metagenomic samples are available, a large database of bacterial genomes from natural environments will be built and made publicly available. This will give the opportunity to investigate the role of adaptive evolution, mutation rate variation between hosts and the colonization history of bacterial strains among humans, all with high confidence due to the sheer data volume. Further, I plan to explore rare SNVs (nucleotide variants segregating at very low frequencies) that many population genetic methods are reliant on. This will be of particular significance, as it will provide insights into growth dynamics of bacterial communities in natural environments, benefiting both evolutionary and clinical research. Thus, the PopMet project is the application of POPulation genetic analysis on large METagenomic datasets.

Mots clés : metagenomics, deep sequencing, comparative genomics, bacterial evolution, speciation

Participants :
- European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 159460.8 €
Projet Monopoly (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Recent advances in the development of both experimental and computational protein engineering tools have enabled a number of further successes in the development of biocatalysts ready for large-scale applications.The production of monomers from cheap, readily available components (e.g. terpenoids) for sustainable biopolymer synthesis is a growing area of interest. Biomaterials composed of lactone monomers have been used to produce polyurethanes.The present research proposal is focused on the deep understanding of catalysis by newly identified BVMO enzymes, realized through detailed structural and functional analysis of enzyme mechanisms and substrate/coenzyme recognition. This project will involve multidisciplinary training, with clear objectives in the technical areas of synthetic biology, proteomics, structural biology and biophysical chemistry. This project will allow me to work on structure/function relationship of proteins and to extend my knowledge in metabolic pathway engineering especially in understanding of monooxygenases.The objective will be to identify new Baeyer Villiger monooxygenases biocatalysts that have the appropriate biocatalytic and stability characteristics to enable lactone monomer synthesis. The methods would generate novel structural and biocatalytic data to provide a comprehensive toolkit of flavin-dependent BayerVilliger monooxygenases that are suitable for exploitation in lactone monomer synthesis. These new biocatalysts will be used to construct new strains of E. coli that are capable of producing the target lactone monomers in high yield. The immediate outcomes will be new structural information (native and variant forms of the enzymes); new biocatalytic parameters (reactivity profiles with target substrates; stereoselectivity; conversion; stability; coenzyme specificities) and new lactone producing strains generated from existing monoterpene producing E. coli strains.

Mots clés : baeyervilliger monooxygenases, lactone monomer, crystallography

Participants :
- University of Manchester (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 224933.76 €
Projet ViMoAct (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Recent research suggests that to control bodily movements the brain relies on Bayes-optimal predictive models that are updated by sensory prediction error. This assumption may be generalised within a new formal account of motor control as active (Bayesian) inference. Active inference explains motor control in terms of hierarchical Bayesian filtering or predictive coding, i.e., as belief updating and suppression of prediction error to optimise a hierarchical generative model in the brain; thereby the weighting of prediction errors by their predicted precision determines their relative impact on hierarchical inference. This novel proposal still lacks concrete empirical investigation. The proposed project will close this research gap by testing whether cortical information flow during manual actions, requiring visuomotor adaptation and cognitive control of attention, follows the principles of active inference. In two fMRI experiments and one MEG experiment, participants will move a photorealistic virtual hand model via an MR-compatible data glove to perform simple manual tracking tasks in a virtual reality environment. The precision of prediction errors at multiple levels of a previously established cortical motor control hierarchy will be experimentally manipulated via visuoproprioceptive conflicts (introduced by delayed visual movement feedback) and via attentional allocation – either stimulus-driven (via increased sensory noise) or endogenous (instructed) – to visual or proprioceptive movement feedback. Active inference’s specific predictions about information flow between and within cortical areas will be tested with recently established dynamic causal modelling of the modelled hemodynamic (fMRI) or spectral (MEG) responses. Active inference appeals to a general free-energy principle of brain function; this contribution will thus promote interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge about self- and world-representation in the brain and will be of general public interest.

Mots clés : visuomotor adaptation, motor control, active inference, precision weighting, fmri, dynamic causal modelling

Participants :
- University of London (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183454.8 €
Projet AF-Cyber (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Recent studies states that "Devices will continue to grow in volume and variety, and the forecast for connected devices by 2020 is 200 billion and climbing". The increase of connectivity brings a drastic impact on the increase of cyber attacks. Protecting measurements are not enough, while finding who did the attack is a crucial for preventing the escalation of cyber attacks. AF-Cyber will relieve part of the cyberattacks problem, by supporting forensics investigation and attribution with logical-based frameworks representation, reasoning and supporting tools. AF-Cyber main core will be a logic-based framework for performing attribution of cyber attacks, based on forensics evidence and an intelligent methodology for dynamic evidence collection. It will analyse and valuate analytically Cyber Forensics applications. Different forensics reasoning rules and techniques will be extracted and a categorization of forensics evidence will be constructed. A new logical formalism will be introduced for representing the analytical and non-monotonic reasoning needed for solving the attribution problem. A tool, based on the logical framework for the attribution reasoning, will be developed. The tool will be tested with different real examples. The tool given the different evidence gives as result a quantitative/probabilistic answer of where the attack came from. A second version of the tool will be developed which will guide the forensics analyst during his work on collecting the evidence, and reasoning about them. A dynamic forensics evidence collection will be designed based on the different reasoning rules, and the involvement of data mining/machine learning algorithms. Cyber security concerns are part of ICT security and Digital Security call. AF-Cyber is in-line with the latest EU Commissions measures for addressing cyber threats, the Connected Digital Single Market: Digital Security call and ENISA’s calls for threat landscapes & cyber security exercises.

Mots clés : cyber security, forensics, forensics in cyber attacks, formal methods, non monotonic reasoning, attribution in cyber crime, decision process, non classical logics

Participants :
- Imperial College London (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183454.8 €
Projet SURFER (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have emerged as the new wireless communication research frontier with the goal of realizing smart and reconfigurable radio propagation environments via passive and tunable signal transformations. Featured by orders-of-magnitude lower hardware and energy cost than traditional active arrays and yet superior performance, RISs are the new driving technology for future 6G wireless networks, especially for enabling them to migrate to higher frequency bands. RISs will fundamentally transform today’s wireless networks with active nodes solely to a new hybrid network comprising active and passive components co-working in an intelligent way, so as to achieve a sustainable capacity growth with low and affordable cost and power consumption. Current wireless networks based on RISs are, however, based on the free-space communication (FSC) paradigm: The radio waves occupy the entire space, naturally propagate in all directions, and are reflected, refracted, and scattered after hitting objects. In contrast with FSC-based RISs, an emerging technology for enabling reliable, energy-efficient, and interference-free communications in indoor environments is surface wave communication (SWC). Surface waves glide at the interface of materials and their propagation is inherently confined on their surface. Compared with FSC, the unique advantages of SWC are a much more favorable pathloss, a much easier interference management, and an inherent low probability of intercept if appropriate anti-wiretapping schemes are used, since the radio waves propagate along surfaces without leaving them and creating unwanted interference. Supervised and trained by a team of five internationally renowned researchers from academia and industry, Surfer’s experienced researcher aims to pioneer the theoretic foundation and experimental validation of SWC for indoor communications and to unveil its ultimate performance limits, optimized design, and integration with FSC.

Mots clés : wireless communications, smart radio environments, smart surfaces, surface waves

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 184707.84 €
Projet REALISM (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Recovery from injury, illness, and/or disease is associated with skeletal muscle disuse. Muscle disuse leads to a loss of muscle mass, strength, and functional independence, and represents a “catabolic crisis” for the elderly who are already at a greater risk for low muscle mass and strength due to age-related sarcopenia. Muscle mass is determined by the balance between muscle protein synthesis (MPS) and muscle protein breakdown (MPB). When MPB exceeds MPS, the result is a negative net protein balance and muscle loss. Decreased MPS rates occur following the onset of immobilization-induced disuse, but there is no information on the response of MPB. mRNA and protein expression data indicate that the early stages of disuse (0-5 days) result in activation of the ubiquitin proteasome system, and presumably MPB suggesting that the initial stages of disuse represent a critical period to intervene with appropriate countermeasures to attenuate the loss of muscle mass and strength. Leucine is a key amino acid in the regulation of muscle protein metabolism that has been shown to inhibit MPB. The current proposal REALISM will 1) identify whether MPB is elevated during the early stages (72 hours) of immobilization-induced disuse, 2) determine whether leucine can reduce MPB and the loss of muscle mass during the early stages of immobilization, and 3) determine whether leucine can preserve muscle mass and strength in the elderly during more prolonged periods of immobilization. REALISM will identify the mechanisms underlying disuse atrophy in response to immobilization and examine potential therapeutic strategies to offset the loss of muscle mass and strength. The M3 laboratory of Dr. van Loon at Maastricht University (UM) offers the most ideal environment for me to conduct REALISM, and take a major step towards the achievement of my career goal of setting up my own research program and establishing myself as an independent scientist.


Participants :
- Maastricht University (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 177598.8 €
Projet SYRMAGINE (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Refugees’ attempts to flee to a certain country are usually preceded by imaginations about possible destination countries. These imaginations not only contribute to refugees’ decisions where to seek asylum but also have an effect on how refugees experience realities when they eventually arrive in the destination country. The research project ‘SYRMAGINE – Syrian Imaginations of Europe’ focusses on how Europe is imagined by Syrian refugees settling in Syria’s neighbouring countries and examines how refugees’ imaginations affect their attitudes to seek asylum in European countries. SYRMAGINE understands “geographical imaginations” of Europe as subjective human conceptions of a geographical location and stresses the differences between “imagined regions” and reality. The project adopts an interdisciplinary mixed-method approach combining a large sample of individual surveys, semi-directive interviews and an online ethnography in two recipient and transit countries of Syrian refugees in the Middle East, Lebanon and Turkey. SYRMAGINE contributes to the academic literature on the active role of imaginations in refugees’ decision-making. From a policy perspective, it responds to one of the key priorities of the Horizon 2020 work programme 2016-2017, which is to investigate the governance of migration and asylum. The research is highly time relevant due to the surge of Syrian asylum application in Europe in the last years: Between April 2011 and June 2016, more than one million Syrians have applied for asylum in Europe (UNHCR 2016). The research project has the following three objectives: 1) to investigate the relation between refugees’ imaginations and decision-making and to study how the present country of residence compares to Europe as a destination choice, 2) to examine how refugees inform themselves about social and political realities in European countries and 3) to use these findings to contribute to the development of evidence-based asylum and integration policies.

Mots clés : syria, refugees, europe, turkey, lebanon, migration, decision making, imaginations

Participants :
- University of Amsterdam (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 165598.8 €
Projet PARAGEN (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Regeneration of bone defects remains a critical challenge in orthopaedics. Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC) with biomaterials show huge promise for bone regeneration. However, MSC die shortly after implantation and act as mediators, by secretion of paracrine factors (PF), rather than effectors of bone formation. Importantly, it seems that delivery of cells themselves may not be required for therapeutic benefit. When MSC are cultured in vitro they release PF into their conditioned media (MSC-CM) including cytokines and extracellular vesicles. The goal of this project is to prepare novel biomaterials which are loaded with MSC-CM for in situ bone tissue engineering. PF secreted into MSC-CM during normoxia, hypoxia, and cell death will be measured. Biomaterials (biphasic calcium phosphate ceramics) will be functionalized with MSC-CM by using the polyelectrolyte multi-layering (PEM) method. The biocompatibility, release kinetics, and potential of MSC-CM loaded biomaterials for bone regeneration will be tested in vitro on cells involved in bone formation (MSC, monocytes, osteoclasts, macrophages, and endothelial cells) and in vivo by implanting the biomaterials in subcutis sites and segmented femoral defects in nude mice. Importantly, the delivery of MSC-CM can overcome the donor-dependent variability in bone formation associated with MSC cell therapy and permits a more straightforward transfer of this therapy to clinical treatment. Since MSC-CM is devoid of cells and doesn’t carry patient rejection risk, autologous MSC are not required. Therefore, selected MSC that successfully induce bone formation can be used to collect potent MSC-CM which can be loaded onto biomaterials for therapeutic use in countless patients. An ‘off-the-shelf’ product that could harness the benefits of MSC therapy but circumvent the costly and time consuming multi-step procedures involved with MSC implantation would be of immense interest to the bone regeneration field.

Mots clés : biomaterials, secretome, cytokines, stem cells, tissue engineering, cell therapy, paracrine, exosommes

Participants :
- Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 246668.4 €
- Harvard University (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet PanILC (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Regulation of the epithelial stem cell compartment is critical for tissue homeostasis and regeneration. Consequently, imbalance in this process, through acquisition of somatic mutations for instance, may give rise to tumorigenesis. Emerging reports reveal that regulatory T cells (Tregs) can modulate epithelial stem cell dynamics in the skin, while type 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s) are known to influence tissue-regeneration. Recent work in our laboratory has elucidated that ILC2s crosstalk is essential for local Tregs expansion. We hypothesize that tissue-resident ILC2s influence the stem cell niche by recruiting and regulating Tregs, and that such a mechanism could be key to tissue regeneration as well as tumor development. Preliminary data in the lab suggest that the intraperitoneal injection of the potent ILC2 inducer IL-33 in mice activates ILC2 in the pancreas, and that a concomitant increase in Treg numbers is observed in this organ. This raises the possibility of the existence of a crosstalk between ILC2s and Tregs in the pancreas upon inflammation, such as in the case of pancreatitis. Given the considerable attention brought lately on the ability of Tregs to develop tissue-promoting capacities, we postulate that regeneration of the exocrine pancreas following pancreatitis may be driven by such pancreatic Tregs upon their “priming” by ILC2. The present project will therefore focus on understanding the role of ILC2 and Tregs and their possible crosstalk in pancreatitis development, as well as in the regeneration process that follows, i.e. the interaction of these immune cells with epithelial progenitors. As pancreatitis is a major risk factor for the development of pancreatic cancer, the resulting observations will then be extended to the analysis of the role of ILC2/Treg crosstalk in tumor development in an orthotopic mouse model of pancreatic tumours as well as in a genetic mouse model of pancreatic adenocarcinoma.

Mots clés : ilc2, treg, pancreatitis, pdac

Participants :
- University of Cambridge (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 224933.76 €
Projet SchmaVirusVacDiag (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Schmallenberg virus (SV) is a pathogen that has been discovered in European livestock 3 years ago. Since then, it has been found that this virus is associated with disease in sheep, goats and cattle across Europe . In livestock, the symptoms associated with the disease include stillbirths and malformations in newborn animals. The presence of the virus in Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands as well as Russia, has shown that this disease is a fast spreading threat to the European livestock industry, and has the potential to cause significant economic impact across the continent. Furthermore, due to high volumes in international trade of livestock, the potential of this disease to spread beyond Europe poses another potential threat to the industry. Recent work using a related bunyavirus (Rift Valley Fever virus) has found that effective DNA vaccines can be generated . These vaccines have the advantage of being administered easily, having low-manufacturing costs, and providing long-lasting efficacy-making it ideal for large-scale vaccination campaigns. Furthermore, studies on related viruses have shown that monoclonal antibodies can be generated for use in diagnostic testing. Using these concepts, we propose to extend this principle to Schmallenberg virus, in order to: i) develop an easy-to-use diagnostic test for Schmallenberg detection; and ii) develop a DNA vaccination strategy that could be used to limit further future outbreaks.

Mots clés : schmallenberg virus, livestock, dna vaccine, structural biology, diagnostic testing, bunayvirus, glycoprotein, nucleoprotein, rna virus, recombinant proteins

Participants :
- CIC bioGUNE (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 158121.6 €