Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet PALAEOINVA (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Loss of biodiversity is one of the most urgent ecosystem threats, and this is particularly clear on tropical islands such as Madagascar. Effective conservation efforts should be informed by assessments of synergistic threats from deforestation, biological invasions, and climate change, which operate on multiple timescales. This proposal uses multidisciplinary biochemical analysis of bones from archaeological and paleoecological deposits on Madagascar to identify endemic predators (fosa) and small mammals (mouse lemurs and rodents) that may be vulnerable to deforestation and negative interactions with exotic counterparts (dogs, rats, and mice). Specifically, we will apply bulk stable isotope analysis to exotic and endemic animal bone collagen from the past ~3,000 years to characterize dietary niches and evaluate the potential for different cases of predation and competition. To obtain a deeper understanding of resource use than is possible with prevailing bulk isotope methods, this project will also include the stable isotope analysis of individual amino acids present in bone collagen. Radiocarbon data from the same bones will substantially contribute to our knowledge of past animal translocations in the western Indian Ocean region. We will also start to identify taxon-specific responses to past changes in resource availability by comparing stable isotope datasets from directly 14C-dated bones with regional records of past climate and vegetation change. These project components will pin-point the degree to which competition has exacerbated (or not) the vulnerability of endemic species to human land management and climate change. The research is consistent with both the current research foci of the host institution and the career interests of the applicant, and the results will answer questions important to the historical sciences, modern biodiversity conservation, and rural communities around the study sites.

Mots clés : radiocarbon, stable isotope, amino acid, predation, deforestation, aridification

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

As the EU is committed to becoming the world’s first climate-neutral continent, fossil fuels need to be replaced by sustainable alternatives. A potential alternative is the upcycling of lignocellulosic biomass to biofuels. However, the cost-efficient generation of biofuel from cellulose is considerably hindered by the recalcitrance of the cellulose biopolymer. In 2010, the discovery of a new family of copper-dependent metalloenzymes called lytic polysaccharide monooxygenases (LPMOs) spurred great hopes as LPMOs were shown to significantly boost the degradation of cellulose and other polysaccharides. Today, eight families of LPMOs have been classified with remarkably diverse substrate specificities and regioselectivities. Furthermore, the metal active sites are in rather different surroundings. Despite combined efforts from experimental and theoretical sides, the reaction mechanism of LPMOs has remained elusive. The here proposed “LyticPol” project suggests that previous theoretical studies lacked general conclusions because they (i) considered too few LPMO families and (ii) employed insufficient theoretical methods for the enzyme environment. The “LyticPol” project aims at elucidating the reaction mechanism of LPMOs, by using a novel theoretical method on a large set of representative LPMO structures. From knowing the mechanism, the reaction conditions of LPMOs can be fine-tuned and the full industrial potential can be reached. This is expected to have substantial economic and social impact. Hence, the results of the “LyticPol” project will be communicated not only to scientific experts but also to the general public. The project will be carried out by Dr. Erna K. Wieduwilt (EKW) under the supervision of Prof. Erik D. Hedegård at the University of Southern Denmark. The project itself and the training of EKW will contribute decisively to her career goal of becoming an innovative and independent researcher in the field of theoretical bio-inorganic chemistry.

Mots clés : lytic polysaccharide monooxygenases, qm mm methods, density functional theory, polarizable embedding

Participants :
- Université du Danemark du Sud (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 214934.4 €
Projet PAINS (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Pain is a leading cause of disability globally, with approximately one in five adults across Europe reporting persistent pain that seriously impacts their lives. The growing personal and societal costs of pain have resulted in strong calls for innovative research to better understand the nature of pain-related suffering and how it can be effectively relieved. Indeed, there have been important developments characterizing pain-related suffering, including its central feature: disruption of one’s sense of self. Disruption of the self may include a loss or alteration of one’s self-identity due to pain (e.g., loss of a valued work role or activity), feeling overwhelmed or consumed by pain, or a painful body part feeling alien or disconnected from oneself. However, there is now a clear gap in the current scientific literature on pain-related suffering: little research has explored how one’s sense of self may be optimally restored or reconstructed through clinical interventions or self-management strategies. Before we can conduct this kind of empirical research, we first need to develop new pain-relevant research methods and theory to examine selfhood restoration and reconstruction. First, this project will develop and implement new qualitative methods to study how clinical interventions and self-management strategies deemed successful by pain sufferers have restored or reconstructed their sense of self. Combined with a robust synthesis of literature and expert consultation, these findings will enable the development of the first comprehensive and empirically grounded framework that specifies how various aspects of the self may be disrupted, restored, or reconstructed. This project will conclude with a series of evidence-based recommendations to help healthcare professionals collaborate with their patients to better target facets of the self to alleviate suffering.

Mots clés : phenomenology, qualitative, selfhood

Participants :
- Université du Danemark du Sud (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet ArTguments (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

In contemporary Europe, art is used as a means of social exclusion, in contravention of Article 21 (Non-discrimination) of the EU Fundamental Rights Charter. Art is at the centre of exclusionary narratives that directly associate certain forms of artistic expression with dementia and crime, among other controversial issues. Specifically, Western culture has coined the term Outsider Art, along with other derogatory and patronizing labels, to marginalize creators from minority groups, arguing that artworks by those artists are not “meant” to be exhibited in traditional museums and galleries. Using biased arguments, which can be referred to as Exclusionary Arguments, the conventional art establishment questions the legitimacy or authenticity of this type of art and promulgates the idea that it is less valuable than academically recognised art. The ArTguments project seeks to address this issue by developing an automated method for identifying Exclusionary Arguments in the arts, aiming to reduce the entrenched narratives that hinder equitable representation and recognition of all forms of artistic expression in contemporary Western art. This research operates on the hypothesis that Exclusionary Arguments can be identified computationally since they display stable cognitive structures expressed through identifiable linguistic patterns. Hence, the research methodology employed involves applying Argument Mining techniques in order to identify and analyse the Exclusionary Arguments embedded in artistic discourse. ArTguments innovatively addresses exclusion in the art world by introducing Exclusionary Arguments as a novel cognitive and communicative unit, offering a systematic approach to analysing exclusion dynamics within discourse. The project will produce key resources, including a catalogue of best practices with actionable recommendations for promoting an inclusive discourse in museums, and a formal proposal for establishing an Observatory for Inclusive Art Discourse.

Mots clés : exclusionary arguments, argument mining, outsider art, inclusion, exclusion, fine arts, argumentation mining, western art, museums, stereotypes

Participants :
- Osservatorio outsider art (Italie) — Partner, associated partner, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 0.0 €
- Birkbeck College (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 345234.9 €
Projet DnReLU (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Navigating a new city's dining scene often confronts us with unavailable options, e.g., 'fully booked,' shaping our behavioral variability such as random exploratory choices and learning errors. Existing theories of reward-guided learning typically overlook option unavailability. Hypothesized strategies may vary, from adjusting action stochasticity—over-exploration to broadly check alternatives, or under-exploration to quickly latch onto available favorites—to adjusting learning process, e.g., weighing past choices for maximal future rewards, or heuristically inflating the value of busy venues while devaluating others ('busier = better'). A nuanced understanding of these tactics requires a deep dive into information sampling, encompassing not just overt evidence-seeking actions but also covert attentional sampling during value updates in the internal model of the world. These complex sampling patterns, unfolding rapidly over hundreds of milliseconds, have been chiefly studied through eye-tracking that captures overt oculomotor variables, leaving the subtleties of covert sampling unexplored and detailed mechanistic insights elusive. I aim to address this issue across multiple scales—from neurotransmitter and neural dynamics to biophysically-grounded modeling of behavior. Using pharmaco-magnetoencephalography (MEG), I will track covert attentional focus across the entire timespan of every single reward-guided decision during learning, in detailed source-localized brain regions, while also perturbing neurochemical systems to establish causal links. This research promises to illuminate longstanding questions, such as why behavioral variability persists despite evolutionary pressures favoring reward-maximizing decisions. The training through this MSCA in circuit-level mechanistic models, imparted by world-leading experts, will complement my existing expertise, and establish me as an independent researcher in the burgeoning field of cognitive computational neuroscience.

Mots clés : magnetoencephalography, reward guided learning, information sampling, attention, decision variability, learning noise, exploration, locus coeruleus, decision making, decision neuroscience

Participants :
- Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf (Allemagne) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- École normale supérieure PSL (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 195914.88 €
Projet MOSS (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The spatial arrangement of solids and pore spaces within soil (soil structure) is a major source of variability in the hydraulic properties of soils. It is through changes in soil structure that biological activity, land management, or the passage of time (including wet-dry and freeze-thaw cycles) affect the capacity of soil to retain and conduct moisture. Nevertheless, soil structure is at most tentatively represented in Earth-system models. As a result, we cannot quantify the effect of biological activity and management on soil water content and thus their full effect on the regional climate or the land carbon sink. This represents an important gap in our understanding of the natural environment, as well as a potential blind spot in our response to the climate emergency. Including soil structure in land-surface models is difficult, because its effect on the soil hydraulic properties cannot be reliably predicted based on a single, easy-to-measure quantity such as bulk density. At the same time, more detailed soil structure data and the methods to incorporate it are largely missing. MOSS will address these issues by 1)~developing a physics-based method of incorporating beyond-density soil structure information into the models of soil hydraulic properties, 2)~implementing this method in a state-of-the-art Earth-system model, and 3)~using the new model to quantify the impact of soil structure on the land carbon sink. By doing so, MOSS will likely demonstrate that soil structure must be included in numerical models and protected in the field. Moreover, the method developed by MOSS will be applicable to agronomical and hydrological models and thus will have a plausible impact on the socially and economically important policy decisions these models inform. Finally, because of the interdisciplinary background of the researcher, we expect that the high visibility and copious training program offered by the fellowship will have a defining impact on their scientific career.

Mots clés : soil physics, soil hydraulic properties, land surface models, land atmosphere interactions

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Partner, associated partner, Recherche, subvention : 0.0 €
- École normale supérieure PSL (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 195914.88 €
Projet NeuroDiDro (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Understanding the fundamental basis of brain disorders is a one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Large-scale genetic studies have identified numerous genes with associated roles in both neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders, suggesting that common mechanisms are involved in the different phases of the same disease. Autophagy is such mechanism, which dysfunction during development or in adult can lead to neurodegenerative diseases, including beta-propeller protein-associated neurodegeneration (BPAN). BPAN is a disease caused by loss-of-function mutations of the autophagy-related gene Wdr45 resulting in neurodevelopmental defects and neurodegenerative phenotypes. Although BPAN is a rare disease, it represents a genetically simple model to understand the contribution of developmental defects during neurodegenerative disease. To answer these questions, we will use Drosophila that provides unequaled experimental power for generating models of human neurological diseases and establishing their molecular genetic basis. Here, using CRISPR/cas9-made Wdr45 null mutant flies generated by Mollereau and col., I examined human Wdr45-linked phenotypes in Drosophila. I found adult-onset neurodegenerative phenotypes including age-related locomotion decline as well as an abnormal hyperkinetic movements in the embryos of Wdr45 mutants. Therefore, targeting Wdr45 in Drosophila, we aim not only to allow identifying the developmental and neural basis of autophagy-associated neurodegeneration, but also to uncovering the disease molecular responses that are prior to the appearance of neurodegenerative syndromes. Ultimately, findings of our proposal can help find early disease biomarkers and design therapies for broad range of neurological disorders.

Mots clés : neurodegeneration, neuro development, autophagy, wdr45, bpan, embryo, adult, behaviour, cell specific, functional imaging, neuronal circuits, genes, drosophila melanogaster

Participants :
- École normale supérieure de Lyon (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 209884.88 €
Projet STBR (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The main goal of this project will be to construct a thermodynamically consistent comprehensive model for biochemical replication using stochastic thermodynamics and control theory.  I will subjugate the process of kinetic proofreading (KPR) to several thermodynamic bounds that have recently been discovered, in order to study the thermodynamic performance of this process. This will be done by considering the process as a chemical reaction network where a sequence of irreversible steps consume energy to increase replication accuracy and are hence bounded by fundamental no-go theorems such as the thermodynamic uncertainty relation (TUR) or the thermodynamic speed limit (TSL). I then investigate how the topology and reaction rates of the KPR network can be optimized with respect to error rate and dissipation by means of machine learning, to deduce how close biological systems operate to these bounds. Subsequently, I will extend the results to the conformational proofreading (CPR) process, where an energy handicap is added to the free energy to increase binding specificity at the expense of binding affinity. The CPR is a proofreading scheme that does not consume energy by burning ATP/GTP, so the entropy production has its origin in the conformational change.  Finally, I test the robustness of the aforementioned KPR and CPR networks. In realistic systems, the kinetic rates can fluctuate as a consequence of e.g., temperature or chemical density variations, which can possibly destabilize the network and lead to more errors in the replication process. This will be done by considering the networks as input-output systems that can be studied by control theory. This provides fundamental bounds such as Bode's sensitivity integral to complement the TUR and TSL. I expect that the research results will lead to a better understanding of the fundamental limits on error correction in biological systems and will inspire further research in biophysics and structural biology.

Mots clés : stochastic thermodynamics, kinetic proofreading, conformational proofreading, control theory

Participants :
- Université de Copenhague (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet LUPINSAFEFOOD (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The demand of the ever-growing world population for dietary protein is no longer sustainable through animal products alone. In this context, the food industry is urged to find methods to meet the demands of high-quality plant-based proteins. Lupins are an interesting crop that produce large seeds containing high protein level (30- 40%). Nevertheless, the commercial value of lupins is primarily based on lupin seed production as stock feed for ruminant and monogastric livestock. Recently, some research has suggested that pulsed electric fields (PEF) processing could significantly alter the microstructure and macromolecular interactions of proteins and improve their functional and biological properties in a chemical-free and low-heat environment. The aims of this project are to develop a sustainable method to obtain high-quality lupin seed proteins with biological antioxidant activity and improved functional and emulsifying properties; in addition, to generate reliable data about the impact of the PEF treatment on the allergenic potential of lupin proteins. Systematic analyzes will be carried out to evaluate the effect of PEF on the physical (secondary structure), chemical (protein content and amino acid profile), biological (antioxidant activity and allergenic properties), functional and emulsifying properties of lupin proteins. The antioxidant potential of the treated proteins will also be investigated to stabilize fish oil-in-water (O/W) emulsions. The process proposed in this study has many advantages, such as being clean-label, free of chemical side-reactions, safe, and efficiency. The data obtained after the execution of this project will support regulatory food agencies aiming to improve the health benefits of lupin-derived products and further expand plant proteins' uses in broader food applications and better meet the increasing protein demands.

Mots clés : lupin proteins, plant proteins, pulsed electric field, proteomic profile, lipid emulsion stability, functional food, globulin proteins, immunoreactivity

Participants :
- Université d'Aalborg (Danemark) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université technique du Danemark (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €