Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ArtPlast (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Despite significant progress in chloroplast biotechnology the de novo synthesis of a chloroplast genome has remained elusive. The development of strategies to design, assemble and transform artificial chloroplast genomes would signify a step-change in the field of plant synthetic biology. Only recently, genome scale DNA synthesis and sequencing has become routine, providing an ideal foundation to revisit the challenge of chloroplast genome synthesis. I will join Ralph Bock, a world leader in chloroplast biotechnology, and combine the expertise of his laboratory with my background in synthetic biology to generate the first Nicotiana tabacum plant with an artificial chloroplast genome. I will base my strategy on creating and testing multiple different genome designs with varied degrees of structural and genetic code alterations in respect to the parental genome to identify viable designs. I will develop methods to assess those designs in parallel, permitting the rapid identification and fixing of problematic regions in the synthetic genome. I will proceed to assemble the verified chloroplast genomes in a hierarchical, parallelized manner from large pieces of synthetic DNA. Finally, I will characterize the phenotype of the resulting plants, focusing on understanding the changes in transcription, translation and metabolism. The methods developed in this work will provide insights into the design principles of organellar genomes, and provide a platform to reinvent and remodel the genetic code of chloroplasts. This work will thereby establish strategies to re-engineering complex cellular processes such as photosynthesis, or to design entirely new functions such as the genetic isolation of synthetic DNA in plants.

Mots clés : synthetic biology, plant biology, chloroplast engineering, biotechnology, genome synthesis, molecular engineering

Participants :
- Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 173847.36 €
Projet SusArt (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Visual appearance (e.g. vibrant colouration) is important for communication in Nature. A particularly interesting example is the aggregates of reflector cells, or so-called "iridocytes", found in marine creatures. Iridocytes are combined in their skin to produce a wide variety of colour effects; depending on their individual properties and spatial arrangement, they can show intense colours when all iridocytes have same periodicity, or a bright white, when the optical response from differently coloured iridocytes is superimposed.  Inspired by this natural strategy, the aim of this proposal is to produce artificial iridocytes. This will be achieved by exploiting the inherent tendency of block copolymers to self-organise into periodic nanoscale structures in solution. In particular, by allowing for this evaporation-driven process to occur within miniscule droplets, it will be possible to produce particles that reflect specific colours of light. Analogous to natural iridocytes, by combining different populations of such particles into a film it will be possible to control the overall appearance. Building on this concept, we will investigate how the shape of the particles and their ensemble arrangement can be used to introduce more sophisticated visual effects, from metallic or iridescent shine to a smooth matte appearance. Finally, we will seek to develop 'smart' coatings, where the appearance can dynamically respond to a stimulus, such as magnetic field.  Our novel approach to coloration has a broad range of potential commercial applications, like inks, paints, cosmetics, displays, sensors. Importantly, by considering the life cycle of the polymers from the outset of the project we will ensure that the produced pigments are not only non-toxic, but also bio-compatible and bio-degradable. This will allow us to respectively address the growing concerns regarding the safety of existing mineral-based pigments and the extent of environmental pollution by microplastics.

Mots clés : sustainable block copolymers, photonic crystals, confined self assembly, structural colours, microspheres

Participants :
- Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 189687.36 €
Projet PHOS-SVD (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) is the leading cause of vascular dementia, plays a significant role in Alzheimer's disease and increases stroke risk, highlighting its critical impact on our ageing population. Endothelial cell dysfunction precedes other pathologies in both human SVD and preclinical models, where a causative deletion mutation and a single nucleotide polymorphism in the phospholipid flippase ATP11B were identified. However, the mechanism of action of ATP11B in SVD remains unclear. ATP11B is thought to mediate the translocation of phospholipids phosphatidylserine (PS) and phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) from the outer to the inner leaflet of plasmalemmal and intracellular vesicular organelle membranes. Both PS/PE contribute to membrane curvature and are essential for function of vesicular organelles. Single-nucleus transcriptome data from human SVD donors suggests involvement of lysosomal/autophagosomal pathways in SVD-affected endothelial cells, while loss of ATP11B disrupts membrane integrity, indicating that lipid changes drive SVD pathology. In PHOS-SVD, I hypothesize that loss of ATP11B alters the normal PS/PE lipid signature of endothelial cell membranes, altering lysosomal/autophagosomal function, promoting endothelial cell dysfunction and SVD pathology. Here, I will address 3 objectives in the Atp11bKO rat SVD model, with subsequent validation in human SVD tissue: 1) describe intracellular vesicular organelle function in endothelial cells in SVD, 2) determine PS/PE distribution in endothelial membranes and their action on intracellular vesicular organelle function and 3) examine if manipulation of lysosomal function and autophagy ameliorates endothelial dysfunction. PHOS-SVD interdisciplinary approach, integrating chemistry, super-resolution imaging and optogenetics, will advance our understanding on lipid membrane signature and its impact on SVD pathology. PHOS-SVD outcomes will help to develop future therapeutics to alleviate SVD burden.

Mots clés : cerebral small vessel disease atp11b phospholipids lysosome autophagy

Participants :
- Université d'Édimbourg (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 260347.92 €
- Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences (Allemagne) — Partner, associated partner, Recherche, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet Q-MIND (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

In the last years, artificial intelligence (AI) has driven critical advancements in sectors like healthcare, autonomous vehicles, entertainment, and finance, transforming science, technology, and our daily lives. Deep-learning neural networks (NNs) are central to many of these AI systems due to their ability to learn complex patterns, largely owing to their nonlinear activation function. However, NNs are typically built on traditional von Neumann architectures, where separate memory and processing units result in inefficiencies, leading to high costs and energy consumption as AI models grow more complex. This has boosted great interest in unconventional computing architectures, like neuromorphic computing, which mimics the brain's design for more sustainable and scalable AI systems. Photonics presents a promising solution here, offering unmatched speed, parallel processing, and energy efficiency that outperform traditional electronic chips. Despite this potential, realizing all-optical NNs presents considerable technical challenges. Key obstacles include weak nonlinear optical interactions, which are essential for creating complex input-output relations in NNs via nonlinear activation functions. In turn, plasmonic systems can provide stronger nonlinearities, but ohmic losses hinder their application.  Q-MIND aims pioneer a radically-new nanometer-scale, ultrafast and energy-efficient technology to address current limitations in neuromorphic computing. Specifically, it will integrate phonon-polaritons—quantum hybrids of light and lattice vibrations—in 2D materials, which can guide light at the nanoscale with minimal energy loss, and heavily doped semiconductors, which will provide tunability and dynamic control of nonlinear interactions. Both materials' nonlocal behavior will be key to unlocking novel nanoscale nonlinear processes at the heart of Q-MIND's vision.  Q-MIND aligns with EU and UN priorities on sustainable development and AI and quantum technologies.

Mots clés : nonlinear optics, phonon polaritons, heavily doped semiconductors, nonlocality, hydrodynamic, two dimensional materials, optical neural networks, hybrid photonics plasmonics, field effect

Participants :
- Conseil national de la recherche (Italie) — Partner, associated partner, Recherche, subvention : 0.0 €
- Italian Institute of Technology (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 193643.28 €
- Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences (Allemagne) — Partner, associated partner, Recherche, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet Tau DG RT-imaging (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Age-dependent neurodegenerative diseases associated with protein aggregation represent one of the most important medical and socio-economic challenges of our time. With the extension of human life span, the prevalence of this group of diseases has markedly increased. Among them, Alzheimer’s diseases (AD) and other dementias have become the second leading cause of death in high-income countries. As a pathological hallmark, Tau amyloid aggregation in the brain has been determined to be closely related to the cognitive impairment in AD and related dementias. Despite major research efforts world-wide, the mechanism of Tau pathology and how its manifestation is prevented in healthy cells is not yet understood. This project builds on recent findings in the host laboratory that the AAA+ ATPase complex of VCP can mediate the disaggregation of Tau fibrils in a cellular model. Consistently, autosomal dominant VCP hypomorph mutations have been found to exacerbate Tau pathology in patients. I will use live cell fluorescence imaging and advanced single-molecule tracking to investigate the mechanism of VCP and cooperating factors in Tau disaggregation in real time. Stable reporter cell lines will be generated in which components of interest carry self-labeling affinity tags to introduce fluorescence signals for single-molecule monitoring. The planned research will provide new insights into the cellular pathways of fibril decomposition and may benefit the development of new therapeutic strategies for tauopathies. The experimental approach to be established in this study can be applied to investigate disaggregation in other neurodegenerative disorders, including Huntington’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Mots clés : chaperones protein aggregation single molecule tracking neurodegenerative diseases tau

Participants :
- Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 173847.36 €
Projet TOPESMASH (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Redox flow batteries (RFBs) are a class of rechargeable electrochemical systems that are particularly promising for grid-level electricity storage. Integrating the advantages of RFBs with metal-air batteries results in hybrid metal-air RFBs, having great potential to unlock ultra-low-cost energy storage if certain efficiency issues are resolved. In these systems, porous electrodes are performance-defining components affecting the thermodynamics, kinetics, and transport phenomena. This project proposes to develop a computational framework of metal-air RFBs to optimize the architecture (topology, morphology, and microstructure) of the porous electrodes. This proposal is the first to implement a multi-scale computational model of metal-air RFBs for accelerating the optimization of the power and electrochemical efficiency of these systems by considering the up-scaling and manufacturability of the optimized designs. This will be achieved by developing high-performance physics-based computational models of metal-air RFB processes in different length scales and employing them in inverse design methodologies for topology optimization of 3D porous electrodes. The up-scaling and prototyping strategies will be based on triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) metamaterial design principles that can for the first time produce high-resolution multi-scale and anisotropic designs of the porous electrodes. Prototypes will be produced using stereolithography 3D printing followed by carbonization to assess the performance of the inversely designed electrodes across different operating conditions. Verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification (VVUQ) approaches will be used to examine the validity of the multi-scale models. Moreover, the project considers moving towards the exascale computing paradigm by leveraging proper high-performance computing (HPC) techniques, enabling the models to simulate large-scale RFB systems more accurately in high resolution.

Mots clés : redox flow batteries sustainable energy storage multi scale computational modeling topology optimization porous electrodes micro macro structure high performance computing additive manufacturing

Participants :
- Université de technologie d'Eindhoven (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 203464.32 €
- Université du Danemark du Sud (Danemark) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet TransCO2 (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The increasing level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere presents a critical factor for climate change and action must be taken urgently to minimise its impact. Using CO2 as a carbon source in the chemical industry for its conversion into valuable chemicals is an advantageous strategy to reduce CO2 emissions and provide a sustainable and cheap source of raw materials to help combat raw material scarcity. Interfacing CO2 reducing enzyme/enzymatic cascades with electrocatalysis present a particular approach to directly power product generation from CO2 with renewable electricity. This was achieved for a few enzymatic cascades; however, these proof-of-concept demonstrations are far from practical use due to lack of efficient method to guide the rational design of these complex multi-enzymes cascades on electrodes, resulting in high costs and low yields. Within this project (TransCO2), my overarching aim is to apply quantitative analysis and rational assembly of enzymatic cascades to enable a breakthrough in bioelectrocatalytic-technology to transform carbon dioxide (CO2) directly into high value mevalonate (C5) at high isolated yields, using electricity as energy source. Specifically, CO2 is firstly converted to formate by the enzyme Formate dehydrogenase (FDH), which is then further converted to mevalonate via 8 steps enzymatic conversions. The whole system will function in an electrochemical cell to make use of electricity as power input. I will build a kinetic model for this enzymatic cascade and implement it to guide the design and optimisation towards highest efficiency with minimal utilization of expensive cofactors.The overall technology in TransCO2 will be a generally applicable breakthrough for efficient production of high-value chemicals from CO2, enabling the large-scale use of CO2 utilisation.

Mots clés : co2 transformation, enzymatic cascade, kinetic modelling

Participants :
- Université technique de Munich (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 189687.36 €
- Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences (Allemagne) — Partner, associated partner, Recherche, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet ME4SURE (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Current climate change and global warming with a continuous increase of methane (CH4) emissions will reshape life on Earth. Oceanic methane emissions are predominantly controlled by the coastal environments, which are confronted with intensifying inputs of various anthropogenic chemicals from human activities. Alarming new correlations have been found between this increased coastal pollution, especially discharges from wastewater treatment plants (WWTP), and CH4 emissions. However, without knowing the mechanism of influence of the anthropogenic chemicals on CH4 cycle in marine sediments, we might be underestimating CH4 into the atmosphere from polluted coastal environments and cannot mitigate these emissions. To move from correlation-based observations to a mechanistic- and experimental-based knowledge of CH4 production pathways in polluted coastal sediments it is necessary to apply multidisciplinary approaches. In this project it is achieved by a novel strategy through both field and experimental approach, where different disciplines: Compound-Specific Isotope Analysis, biogeochemistry, and microbial analysis are applied to provide separate line of to define the level of anthropogenic organic chemicals influence of CH4 emissions in coastal environment. I will investigate a representative polluted coastal area located in the Swedish West coast, which hosts the largest Scandinavian oil harbor (the primary petrochemical industry in Sweden), several streams debouch from agricultural areas, and the direct discharge of hundreds of chemicals from a WWTP. This project is the first step to improve our understanding on how much CH4 is produced in coastal areas affected by chemical pollution with global impact on the CH4 oceanic budget.

Mots clés : methane, coastal pollution, methanogenesis, isotope analysis

Participants :
- Université de Göteborg (Suède) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 222727.68 €
- Université du Danemark du Sud (Danemark) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet HealthDeterminants (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Economic Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The proposed research project aims at contributing to the literature on work-related determinants of health, and innovates previous studies by investigating the impact of risk of automation (proxied by a percentage of routine tasks in the occupation) on both subjective and objective measures of health of employees. By merging survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) with expert data from BERUFENET and adopting the methodology proposed by Dengler et al. (2014), the project addresses the following research questions: i) to which extend does risk of automation affect health outcomes of German employees; ii) what are possible transmission mechanisms behind the health differences of German employees related to risk of automation; iii) is selection into occupations at a higher risk of automation determined by a health status of individuals. The project will have a meaningful impact on society. To begin with, the scientific community can benefit due to promoting gender specific multidisciplinary research which adopts methodologies from social sciences (e.g. mediation analysis, structural equation modeling) and implements them innovatively in the field of economics. In addition, the project shows how to use different types of data (e.g. surveys, expert databases) to properly address modern challenges and enrich evidence on established topics. Furthermore, the project serves as a “testing ground” for a novel methodology of measuring the risk of automation for a variety of occupations. From the economic and societal perspective, the project estimates the magnitude of the “social costs of digitalization” and provides guidance to policy-makers and companies to decrease negative spill-over effects of technological change on population health. Last but not least, the social impact of the project is related to analysing new trends in the development of society and assessing actual threats for public health due to ongoing digital transformation.

Mots clés : health outcomes, digitalization, risk of automation, routine tasks, panel data, gsoep, berufenet

Participants :
- Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 173847.36 €
Projet SPEEDY (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Nanoscience is revolutionizing the 21st century in a multitude of areas from nanomedicine to communication technologies, and nanomagnetism is playing a key role in this revolution. The recent move to three dimensional nanomagnetic systems brings with it not only the appearance of novel and unconventional magnetic states but also the realisation of unprecedented properties. In particular, the three-dimensionality is predicted to have a significant influence on the dynamics of magnetic domain walls, soliton-like textures that form the basis of many proposed spintronics devices in recent years. Despite these promising opportunities, most of these exciting new properties remain predictions and have not yet been realised experimentally. SPEEDY aims to establish for the first time an experimental understanding of magnetic domain wall dynamics in systems with a complex 3D structure. We will determine the influence of 3D geometry - by the introduction of curvature and torsion - on the domain wall motion through the study of carefully designed systems with increasing complexity. The project will be conducted in the group of Dr. C. Donnelly at the Max Planck institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, including two secondments of three months in the group of Dr. O. Fruchart in SPINTEC. SPEEDY also constitutes a career development project aimed at enhancing the creative and innovative potential of the applicant, providing excellent working conditions in a high-level highly collaborative research environment. This opportunity will prepare the applicant to become a well-established independent scientist and will be key to building her successful scientific research career in Europe.

Mots clés : nanotechnology, 3d nanomagnetism, nanofabrication, magnetic microsocopy

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 173847.36 €