Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet CMDNAUP (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) allows rapid bacterial evolution including the spread of genes encoding antibiotic resistance and virulence factors. The Gram-negative bacterium Vibrio cholerae is an important human pathogen that causes the pandemic disease Cholera. In its natural aquatic environment growth on the chitinous exoskeletons of zooplankton initiates the development of ‘Natural Competence’, a widespread and key form of HGT that allows bacteria to take up free DNA from the environment. DNA uptake involves a sophisticated nanomachine known as a Type IV Pilus (TFP), which forms polymeric extensions from the cell surface, are ubiquitous throughout bacteria and play a wide range of other roles such as surface motility and attachment. Notably, this machinery is conserved in other naturally competent bacteria including in several important human pathogens, implying a common mode of action. Work on this machinery has mainly been done in Gram-positive models like Bacillus subtilis but had failed to visualise an uptake pilus. Recently, the Blokesch lab visualised a DNA uptake pilus extending from the outer membrane of V. cholerae and determined the minimal known components needed for its assembly. However, we still know almost nothing about how this machinery actually works to bring DNA into the cell. To answer this important question and elucidate the underlying molecular mechanisms we will follow two main objectives. 1. We will determine the composition of purified DNA-uptake pili and investigate the functions of the identified proteins. 2. We will combine innovative genetic and cell-biological approaches to investigate the mechanism of DNA uptake. The Blokesch lab at EPFL has pioneered genetic and cell biological methods for studying competence in V. cholerae and has state-of-the-art equipment and infrastructures that offer the prospective fellow the maximum chance of success and the best-possible training through the research.

Mots clés : horizontal gene transfer, type iv pilus, vibrio cholerae, cellular microbiology

Participants :
- Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (Suisse) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 175419.6 €
Projet REOX (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Hormone signaling allow organisms to regulate their physiology. Single hormones trigger multiple and complex, context-dependent responses that evolved from simpler, ancestral pathways. A key, unanswered question is what functions were initially regulated by these ancestral pathways. In plants, auxins are key hormones that regulate multiple processes throughout the life-cycle. The three-components auxin signaling system is an excellent model of a simple pathway that generates a complex response, but it is unclear how this system has evolved. In the REOX project, I will use Charophycean algae that contain only a partial auxin response system, to reconstruct the evolutionary trajectory that allowed the emergence of the first auxin response pathway. I will study the structure, function and regulation of the closest algal orthologs of the plant transcriptional regulatory proteins, the ARFs. I will next synthetically revive the ancestral components of the pathway and assemble these into a functional response system in algae. With this, I expect to reveal the ancestral function of the auxin response system, and reconstruct the evolutionary trajectory towards hormone action in land plants. I expect this project to inspire similar strategies in the molecular evolution field. From a training point of view, this fellowship will build on my expertise on evolutionary genetics and molecular biology and allow me to complement these with skills in protein biochemistry and algal biology. This will prepare me for a future in studying evolution at different levels of complexity (molecular to ecological), and will boost my opportunities to reach an independent academic research position in this field. In summary, this projects aims to advance our understanding on the origin of hormone signalling and response evolution, and render a well-trained academic researcher with the capacities needed to develop a professional career within evolution research.

Mots clés : hormones, auxins, evolution, algae, crispr, cas9

Participants :
- Wageningen University & Research (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 175572.48 €
Projet PALEOS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Horse domestication has had major impact on human civilization through mobility, warfare and economy. In spite of horse domestication being one of the most important turning points in the human history, lack of reliable well preserved archaeological records have been an obstacle in investigating earliest horse domestication and environmental factors influencing it. Furthermore if and how early husbandry practices influenced local environment is unknown. PALEOS here proposes to use interdisciplinary approach for this purpose. It will combine Prof. Ludovic Orlando’s expertise in paleogenomics and Dr. Kuldeep More’s in sedimentary genomics and paleo-environmental reconstruction through organic geochemistry analyses. Eneolithic Botai site in northern Kazakhstan chosen for this research shows strong evidence indicative of pastoral husbandry, involving milking and harnessing. It, thus, provides a unique opportunity to catch domestication red-handed at its earliest. During the 3rd millennium BCE, different domestic horses superseded Botai horses and the descendants of Botai people also vanished. What made Botai culture to choose this environment as a breeding ground for horses and why did it stop is presently unknown. One hypothesis posits that local environmental changes at Botai may have become incompatible with husbandry. Additionally, little is known about the husbandry techniques that allowed Botai people to domesticate the horse for the first time. PALEOS plans to take several soil sediment cores that will be split in half with each half for organic geochemistry and genomic analyses. Organic geochemistry part will reveal paleoclimate changes while genomics part will reveal changes in eukaryotic and prokaryotic community. When combined we will get holistic picture of dynamics of husbandry practices in relation to the local paleoenvironmental changes. Furthermore, plant and microbial data obtained from the site will shed light on dietary specification of Botai horses.

Mots clés : paleogenomics, sedimentary genomics

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

How can single-molecules be best utilized in electronics? Feature sizes of integrated circuits will reach this scale in 10-20 years (Moore’s Law). Typical molecular studies involve surface self-assembled components first synthesised elsewhere (ex situ). Yet surface-based (in situ) preparations offer several distinct synthetic advantages – also simplifying the construction of otherwise difficult to prepare asymmetrical surface-bound motifs. In this project I will (i) explore unconventional in situ syntheses of single-molecule electronic components, and (ii) develop scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) techniques to assess the success of chemical reactions at the single-molecule scale. High yielding and versatile (e.g. ‘Click’ ) reactions will prove invaluable in this context. My largely unexplored approach will be used to rapidly screen novel single-molecule diodes and wires, improving rectification ratios and conductance. It will also be applied to produce complex molecular ‘test-beds’, allowing electron transport to be probed through single-molecules orientated parallel to the surface (enabling studies of mechanically weak analytes). This research has broad application and far-reaching impact in data storage and computation (‘wiring-up’ molecules in circuits), and will open up exciting possibilities in sensing and catalysis. Project results, and nano-science in general, will be actively promoted through a series of Outreach workshops, lectures (implemented in Europe) and a new internet blog, ‘Nanotechnology, Translated’ (contributing to the growing international science blogosphere). A planned secondment to the microelectronics industry will provide commercial and technical insights useful for securing funding and developing future technologies over the next two decades. The new collaborations and enhanced international profile, networks and training provided by this Fellowship will ultimately prove pivotal in helping me establish my independent academic career.


Participants :
- Université de Rennes (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 246668.4 €
- Columbia University (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet MUSIC (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

How can we understand one another? Our everyday conversations appear to revolve around our linguistic abilities. But creating mutual understanding involves more than formulating grammatically correct sentences. Recently, cognitive science has shown that mutual understanding relies on shared knowledge and beliefs, conceptual knowledge that is continuously adjusted as we interact. Yet, social neuroscience has mainly focused on how individuals respond to social stimuli without a social context. Consequently, the neural mechanism that underlies our ability to create mutual understanding with another person remains largely elusive. The proposed project addresses this interdisciplinary gap, testing the hypothesis that creating mutual understanding requires a neural mechanism that supports a continuous adjustment of conceptual knowledge. That hypothesis will be tested by sampling and interfering with neuronal activity in humans during live social interaction, at the University of California. First, I will investigate the neuronal implementation of mutual understanding through intracranial recordings from the human brain. The exquisite spatiotemporal precision of these recordings offers the unprecedented possibility to characterize how conceptual knowledge is mechanistically adjusted during social interaction. Second, I will investigate frontotemporal dementia, a neurological disorder known to disrupt access to conceptual knowledge. This unfortunate experiment of nature offers the unique opportunity to understand how progressive alteration in brain tissue and connectivity affects the ability to create mutual understanding. These studies will offer a neural- and system-level mechanism of human mutual understanding, which I will translate into testable accounts of communicative alterations in a range of neurological and psychiatric disorders, during the return phase at the Donders Institute and King’s College London.

Mots clés : human cognition, social interaction, conceptual knowledge, electrocorticography, lesion symptom mapping

Participants :
- University of California System (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Radboud University Nijmegen (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 260929.8 €
Projet ARPED (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

How do artisans approach their role as educators? As part of long-standing research on world craft practices and their social, cultural, and economic dimensions, anthropologists have been paying attention to processes of learning: how aspiring practitioners acquire skills and know-how through participation in social settings. The influence of these studies extends well beyond the boundaries of anthropology, to inform research in the social sciences of learning. Within this research, scant attention has been given to the perspectives of artisans, who are not just skilled practitioners but also often skilled educators. To redress this, this project proposes to develop the concept of artisan pedagogies, to denote the skills and understandings that artisans develop through the practice of teaching and mentoring novices. It will do so by taking social interactions in the context of practice-based learning as its focal point of investigation, and recognising that diverse forms of craft provide unique perspectives onto learning. The research develops an innovative and inter-disciplinary methodology, combining sociolinguistics (conversation and interaction analysis) approaches with ethnographic methods (participant observation, apprenticeship as method). It deploys a participatory approach to elicit artisans’ implicit understandings about how novices learn, and implicit work and social ethics. The methodology will be applied to two empirical case studies addressing dry-stone masonry in Switzerland and Taiwan, allowing for a comparative dimension based on exploration of pedagogies in relation to procedures, culture and the environment. The study will lead to re-evaluating key theories and concepts in the anthropology and social sciences of learning, in light of expert practitioners' own understandings and practices.

Mots clés : craftwork, enskilment, sociality

Participants :
- University of Geneva (Suisse) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 304724.16 €
Projet MEMORISING (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

How do societies remember? Memory is fragile and volatile and thus people around the world, and through time, have created ways to recall events and to share knowledge. The MEMORISING project will be a training-through-research project aiming to explore the relationships between memory, rock art and acoustics by using case studies from indigenous and non-indigenous backgrounds from Europe and America. I will compile and review the related literature on the aforementioned topics, and document the rock art and aural phenomena at rock art sites in both areas. I will record legends and traditions about the sites in Europe as well as stories, ritual activities and people’s perceptions at sites in America. Following the methodology received in my training at the UB, I will test the acoustics of rock art sites in both areas. The importance of sound to present-day local communities in both regions will be explored through ways learned at the UB in the form of interviews, historical and ethnographic accounts. Test areas will be located in the Montes de Prades (Tarragona, Spain) and Oaxaca (Mexico). Results will be disseminated widely in academic venues, and social impact will be sought through activities in local communities and media publications. MEMORISING is a multidisciplinary project integrating perspectives from archaeology, anthropology and acoustics. It aims also at contributing to the pride of place in the areas where the sites to be investigated are located. Reports to heritage managers and local councils will promote the future sustainability use and possible exploitation of the sites.

Mots clés : rock art, archaeoacoustics, memorisation, knowledge transfer, ethnoarchaeology

Participants :
- University of Barcelona (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 158121.6 €
Projet MEDPOL (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

How do the media report EU affairs, and to what extent may such coverage shape public attitudes and behaviour towards integration? MEDPOL aim is twofold: to investigate how media coverage of the EU has evolved since the signature of the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 until today, and to assess the impact of news content and frames on political attitudes and behaviour towards the EU in different member states. Drawing on various disciplines - Political Science, Communication Studies and Political Economy - the project follows a mixed methods approach grounded on agenda-setting and framing theories. It consists of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of media content in four states: Italy, Portugal, Spain and France. Manual and automated coding of press content and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques will be used to analyse large amounts of textual data while maintaining rigorous methodological standards. MEDPOL brings together content analysis, electoral data and open-access social and economic indicators in order to analyse how issue visibility and media framing may influence electoral behaviour in different countries and social groups. Findings will further our understanding of how certain terms or sentences have been used to frame EU affairs and to express different ideas about the EU. MEDPOL analyses how these frames emerge and evolve over time, and through which mechanisms they may compete with each other and contribute to political polarisation. Finally, MEDPOL contributes to the diffusion of content analysis techniques, mixed methods and interdisciplinary approaches devoted to understand the role of the media as a political actor. Outputs include two peer-reviewed publications, a monograph, an open-access code that allows the method to be adapted to other cases, an academic workshop, a series of evidence-based comments aimed at a non-specialised audience (journalists, policy-makers, watchdog organisations), and public engagement activities.

Mots clés : political attitudes and behaviour towards eu, media framing, content analysis, mixed methods, topics model, supervised machine learning, comparative analysis, press, france, italy, portugal, spain

Participants :
- Fondation nationale des sciences politiques (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 196707.84 €
Projet EACISD (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

How is information organized in the brain? Does our understanding of everyday concepts rely on our perceptual experience, and our ability to sense them? And can this uncover how abstract information is coded in our brains? These puzzles are at core of cognitive neuroscience and brain organization. Two major theoretical bodies differ in their account of neural concept organization: Classical cognitive theories propose that concepts are symbolic and non-sensory, and are further linked to sensory-motor aspects, whereas embodied cognition theories (e.g. mirror neuron system theory) postulate that concepts are represented only in a sensory-motor manner, and representations depend on the ability to simulate, re-enact, its perceptual process or action. To address this contradictory account of concepts organization, a systematic interdisciplinary neuroimaging investigation will be conducted in a combination of special populations, each deprived from birth from an entire sensory modality or ability. The neural correlates of impossible-to-embody concepts will be studied in congenitally blind (e.g. rainbow), deaf (e.g. jazz) and ULD subjects (born without functional hands; e.g. manually handles tools). Brain responses will be analyzed using multiple, state-of-the-art neuroimaging decoding techniques to reveal brain areas representation content and dependence on sensory experience. The neural networks of such concepts will be charted, to investigate the link between abstract thought and sensory inputs. A novel non-linear measurement method to quantity the richness of representations will be developed and applied to the sensorily-deprived groups, to map the dimensions related to specific sensory modalities. At the final stage, these methods will also be applied to study the developing brain in children. The findings have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of brain organization and pave the road towards rehabilitation of multiple sensory and cognitive deficits.

Mots clés : concept knowledge, abstract, concrete, vision, audition, motor, neuroscience, sensory, deprivation, brain organization, embodied cognition, development, plasticity, autism

Participants :
- Harvard University (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israël) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 263385.0 €
Projet TFtoChromatin (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

How the genomic blueprint of an organism is translated into cellular phenotype is a fundamental question in modern biology. The instructions need to be specifically regulated for cells to function. The regulation of the readout of this information is not entirely written in the DNA sequence but also requires epigenetic directives like DNA and histone modifications. The maintenance of cellular states as well as their controlled differentiation requires the establishment of correct transcriptional patterns. Binding of specific transcription factors (TFs) to promoter and cis-regulatory regions is the key factor in regulating gene activity. This binding occurs in the context of chromatin, where nucleosomes and their modification states are thought to limit DNA access. This might in part account for why most TFs only occupy a minor fraction of their preferred sequence motifs. Moreover, chromatin sensitivity can create hierarchies between TFs since sensitive factors might rely on “pioneer” factors to establish a state of open chromatin. Despite its general relevance these models remain speculative due to limited understanding of the actual sensitivity of individual TFs to the local chromatin state. To narrow this gap in our knowledge I will establish a system to locally manipulate chromatin in vivo and measure the resulting effect on binding of individual TFs at a defined chromosomal site. By systematic variation of nucleosome positioning and epigenetic modifications and its impact on TF occupancy this project aims to generate novel insight into the fundamental principles that regulate transcription output.

Mots clés : chromatin, gene regulation, transcription factors, nucleosome positioning, epigenetic modifications

Participants :
- Friedrich Miescher Institute (Suisse) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 175419.6 €