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

From around 25 to 20 thousand years ago, most of northern Europe was covered by ice and humans retreated into refuges in the warmer southern territories. The archaeological record of the Western European Late Pleistocene clearly indicates a refuge encompassing the areas of Cantabria, in northern Spain, and Aquitaine, in southern France. Both archaeological and genetics evidence agrees that it was from this “Franco-Cantabrian” refuge that Western Europe was repopulated in several phases starting at around nineteen thousand years ago. As pioneer groups expanded their ranges into previously uninhabited northern territories, Late Glacial hunter-gatherers had a unique opportunity to engineer their evolving ecosystem or niche. According to the Niche Construction paradigm such practices deeply change the selective pressures of that niche on its populations, both human and non-human, thus affecting not only cultural transmission, but also biological/genetical transmission: a triple inheritance model. The LaGRangE project proposes to study the Late Glacial hunter-gatherer range expansions, and the role of Niche Construction in these. This will be achieved by an interdisciplinary approach to the problem applying established Computer Science methods to archaeological data. Firstly Niche Construction triple-inheritance models will be modelled to understand how niche construction affects the dispersal dynamics of a given population. This new understanding will then be used to model the Late Glacial dispersal of humans out of the Franco-Cantabrian refuge, on a biogeographically realistic domain. This approach will help identify routes, preferred habitats and other dispersal choices taken by the expanding groups.

Mots clés : prehistoric human dispersals, upper palaeolithic, niche construction, mathematical modelling

Participants :
- CERCA Institution (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 158121.6 €
Projet FTD-Organoids (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is the second most common form of dementia. A pathological hallmark is the formation of protein aggregates that consist mainly of Tau or TDP43. Patients suffer from the degeneration of the frontal and temporal lobes with no effective treatments being available. The recent advancement of 3D brain organoid cultures grown from embryonic stem cells offer new possibilities to study disease mechanisms of neurological disorders and help validate therapeutic interventions. I therefore propose to generate the first cerebral organoid models of FTD. The new models will first be thoroughly characterized by immunohistochemical stainings and biochemical analysis. Furthermore, I will determine neuroaxonal degeneration, visualize protein aggregates and their cell-to-cell spreading and analyze the nucleation of the pathological protein conformation. In addition, I will determine if FTD-organoids recapitulate the brain region- and cell type-specific vulnerability that are observed in patients. FTD has also been linked to aberrant phase transition of proteins that can lead to disturbances in proteome and RNA homeostasis. However, molecular mechanisms and consequences of this processes in disease conditions remain largely unknown. I therefore propose to study the dynamics and molecular composition of stress granules, which are functional biomolecular condensates that arise through liquid-liquid phase separation during stress conditions, in FTD cerebral organoids. Disease-associated changes in stress granule dynamics and thus disturbances in RNA metabolism and regulation of neuronal translational might result in the lack of essential neuronal proteins. I will therefore identify and quantify key mRNA and protein components of neuronal stress granules in brain organoids. In summary, this project will provide new mechanistic insights into disease mechanisms of FTD and open new possibilities of therapeutic interventions.

Mots clés : cerebral organoids, liquid liquid phase separation, neurodegeneration, pathologic protein conformations

Participants :
- Austrian Academy of Sciences (Autriche) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 174167.04 €
Projet AHEAD (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Fuel availability can constrain human occupation of desert environments – fuel availability is as important as water, food and building materials. The aim of AHEAD is to reveal the use of fuelwood resources in negotiating human survival in three contrasting desert areas in South America over the long-term; from foraging subsistence societies to colonial mining exploitation. The three study sites cover a range of altitudinal zones, allowing comparison between inland (hyperarid) vs coast (arid) deserts. The project’s core discipline is anthracology (charcoal identification to source species) contextualised by a regional review of available palaeoenvironmental data. Insights on fuel use history will be supported by biomolecular analysis to distinguish the functions of hearths (i.e. domestic cooking or metal working) and isotope analysis to provide data on changes in water availability in the past. The ambitious project is highly feasible due to the fellow's extensive experience in wood identification in South America, and personal reference collection of wood and charcoal from Argentinian and Chilean deserts. Moreover, all archaeological samples are available and from securely dated contexts; the fieldwork is solely for the collection of fresh wood for comparison and surface samples of subfossil wood - i.e. the project is low risk and highly cost-effective. AHEAD will benefit from York's expertise in isotope and of the collaboration with LandCover 6K network, including cutting-edge research on integrating long-term and spatially diverse palaeoenvironmental and archaeological data. In addition to being exposed to the global LandCover 6K project, the applicant will learn spatial extrapolation technique to move perspectives of human-resource use interactions from the site to the landscape scale. This project directly feeds into current global research initiatives that are employing long-term land use and landcover data to refine and test predictive climate models.

Mots clés : fuelwood, anthracology, isotopes, biomolecular analysis, holocene, atacama desert

Participants :
- University of York (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 195454.8 €
Projet greenEV (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Functional foods boosted with bioactive nutrients to enhance health and mitigating disease conditions are experiencing an amazing progress. Encapsulation is becoming an important strategy to enhance the bioavailability of poorly absorbed compounds and developing healthy foods. In this context, novel nano-scale approaches to create alternative delivery options for nutraceuticals are emerging. GreenEV aims to develop a continuous plant tissue culturing system for the manufacturing of non-mammalian nanovesicles, and exploit them for the encapsulation, release and bioavailability enhancement of selected nutraceuticals. Plants cells have been shown to physiologically release phospholipid membrane-surrounded vesicles into the apoplast and environment. These vesicles are morphologically similar to mammalian extracellular vesicles (EVs). The process that drive the vesicle formation and their release through the semi-rigid cell wall is not trivial, and will be studied in the greenEV. The experienced researcher is a plant biologist with strong background in plant tissue culturing who team-up with the Institute of Biosciences and BioResources (IBBR) with considerable expertise in EV research to realize a uniquely interdisciplinary research program. The research proposed here will realize the following concrete objectives: 1. Set-up a novel, plant-based EV production system, 2. Employ an integrated analytical pipeline for the isolation, characterization, encapsulation, uptake and toxicological profiling of plant secreted EVs. Neither of these objectives have been addressed before and both have high potential to expand the knowledge in the field and to drive the research activity towards industrialized continuous production of plant EVs. The research objectives are integrated with concerted training objectives in EV research, omics, outreach program, dissemination events and considerable knowledge transfer in plant tissue culturing from the researcher to the IBBR host group.

Mots clés : extracellular vesicles, nanovectors, plant cell suspension culture, mass spectrometry, nutraceuticals, secretion mechanisms, biochemistry, continuous reactors, gingko biloba, tomato, cosmeceuticals

Participants :
- National Research Council (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 183473.28 €
Projet BranchOut (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Fungal infections result in millions of deaths and billions of superficial infections each year. Morphological transitions are critical for fungal virulence. Filamentous hyphal branching is affected by nutrients and suggested to be altered during infection. The aim of this interdisciplinary project is to determine the importance of branching in the human opportunistic fungal pathogen Candida albicans. Specifically, how is branching controlled and regulated in time/space during infection? Towards this goal, I will investigate branching at the molecular/cellular levels, and use genetic/molecular perturbation to delineate functions and requirements of branching. Live-cell imaging will be used to determine the frequency and position of hyphal branching, as a function of infection-relevant conditions, including growth on/in different stiffness substrates, physical confinement, nutrients and gaseous environment. This will help us to characterize the biophysics of branching and to understand the spatial regulation of the process. To address how branching is affected by host cells, this process will be followed in co-culture with reconstituted human epithelia To determine at molecular/cellular levels the critical processes and components that localize to incipient branch sites, I will use different fluorescent reporters. Targeted and unbiased, genetic/molecular approaches will be used to probe the functions and requirements of branching and selected mutants will be examined in mice. Using optogenetics, I will investigate perturbation of branching by induction of de novo branching. In summary, this interdisciplinary project, that takes advantage of cutting-edge imaging, molecular approaches and biophysics tools, will shed light on the importance and regulation of branching during fungal infections.

Mots clés : fungal infection, candida albicans, filament branching, opportunistic fungal pathogen, cellular organization

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 196707.84 €
Projet DIRECTION (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Fungi have a devastating impact on human nutrition and health. Fungal pathogens provoke huge yield losses in crops, destroying around 23% of the agricultural production annually. A major proportion of this loss is caused by pathogenic root-colonizing microbes that have evolved sophisticated strategies to outcompete the benign microbial competitors in the rhizosphere and to actively suppress the plant immune response. The fungal pathogen Fusarium oxysporum (Fox) is a soil-borne root infecting fungus that provokes vascular wilt disease in over a hundred different agricultural crops, and represents a serious threat world-wide. The current control methods for this pathogen depend upon extensive use of chemical pesticides, which are highly unsustainable in the food-chain. Here we propose to use the Fox-tomato interaction as a model to molecularly dissect the role of the root (including endophytic) and rhizosphere microbiota in modulating vascular wilt disease. We will use a barcoded pyrosequencing approach to taxonomically define the root and rhizosphere microbiome in tomato. Next, we will dissect the impact of the microbiome on fungal host sensing, using an established collection of isogenic signalling mutants of Fox available in the host lab. We will carry out in vivo Fox- bacterial interaction assays to generate a dataset for identification of bacterial communities exerting an antagonistic effect on pathogen colonization. The project will thus produce new insights into the interplay between the root microbiome and pathogen colonization. The, generated knowledge platform will be used to reassemble a synthetic ‘SynCom’ microbiome that will be used to control Vascular Wilt, thereby advancing the development of sustainable agriculture.

Mots clés : microbial ecology, fusarium, tomato, synthetic biology, microbiome

Participants :
- University of Córdoba (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 170121.6 €
Projet MAHT-FunSST (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Fungicide development and screening is stuck in an innovation gap, in which it incurs staggering expenses and takes many years to get a fungicide to market, furthermore, many pathogens develop resistance against fungicides which necessitates the sensitivity screening and recalled fungicides. The present proposal is conceptualized to bridge the gap for high throughput (HT) screening of fungicides effectively, by designing the novel lab-on-chip device. Specifically, we will assess (i) baseline sensitivity of fungicides against phyto-pathogenic fungi, (ii) response of fungi to different doses of fungicides, (iii) antifungal effects induced on fungal conidia, (iv) specific enzyme inhibition by fungicide. The fungicide screening lab-on-a-chip will address the large and currently unmet need to model fungicide screening device, regarding the spatial and mechanical cues important for conidia. The project will be based on the state-of-the-art technical expertise of ELVESYS in microfluidic chip design and fabrication and will fully integrate the Experienced Researcher’s (ER) strong expertise with agricultural plant pathology, molecular plant-microbe interactions and fungicides design and screening to develop a HT fungicide screening chip. Testing and validation of the product will be by perfusion using a set of candidate fungicides. The development of lab-on-a-chip technology will result in increasing the pre- and in-field HT screening of fungicides for their efficacy, optimal dosing and toxicity. The device will minimize the cost of fungicide development and screening, thus reducing the economic burden in the EU area as well as having large implications on improving the production of food globally. Through this opportunity the ER will be immersed in a richly entrepreneurial environment at ELVESYS and exposed to marketing concepts. Together, these experiences will provide the ER with the optimal environment to become a leader in next generation tools for fungicide screening.

Mots clés : plant pathology, fungicide discovery and design, potato diseases, fungicide screening, fungicide resistance and sensitivity, microfluidics, lab on a chip, molecular microbe plant interaction

Participants :
- Elvesys (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 196707.84 €
Projet Alloem (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

High embryonic mortality at the peri-implantation period (70%) is accounted after pig embryo transfer (ET), which is almost double than that of natural breeding or artificial insemination (AI). Since pregnancy is an interesting immunological paradox, our starting hypothesis is that the mechanisms regulating the maternal immune response to the embryos may be less efficient in the case of ET pregnancies, where the transferred embryos are allogeneic (e.g. contain paternal and maternal material unrelated to the recipient mother) than after natural breeding or AI, where only paternal material is unrelated to the mother (semi-allogeneic). This difference could be behind the increased embryonic death. The project will study transcriptomic and cytokine changes of porcine endometrial tissue in the presence of semi-allogeneic and allogeneic embryos during the peri-implantation period and also in the placenta of healthy and arrested fetuses. The results of the project will unveil mechanisms behind embryo-maternal dialogue. This fact is relevant in view of the necessary implementation of emergent breeding technologies, as embryo transfer (ET), for supporting sustainability and competitiveness of the European pig sector. EU is currently second biggest pig producer in the world and the largest exporter of antibiotic- and residue-free pig products derived from animals raised on highest welfare standards and with the highest genetic value. The understanding of embryo-maternal dialogue under allogeneic environments might be determinant to implement new strategies to increase the reproductive performance after ET not only in pigs but also, comparatively, in other livestock species and even in humans, where the use of donor oocytes for IVF is currently increasing. This project, with a focus on pregnancy immunological regulation, is of utmost interest for the EU goals, contributing to determine which factors still jeopardize full fertility and prolificacy when applying ET technology.

Mots clés : embryo transfer, porcine, cytokines, gene expression, endometriun, pregnancy

Participants :
- Linköping University (Suède) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 191852.16 €
Projet HGSOC (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

High grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) is the most common and lethal subtype of ovarian tumors, and is the 5th leading cause of cancer related deaths among women in the western world. Recent studies have pointed at the fimbriae of the fallopian tube (FT) as one of HGSOC’s main origins. The existence of FT stem cells (SCs) has been suggested, however, their isolation and characterization have been so far elusive. Given the potential of SCs to accumulate mutations, these cells may represent one of the cellular origins of HGSOC. This project is aimed at identifying SCs of the FT, evaluating their tumorigenic capacity and establishing a novel in-vitro human model for HGSOC development. Preliminary screening experiments of well-established SC markers have identified Lgr6 and Troy expression in the mouse oviduct. These putative SC populations will be further characterized and their capacity to maintain tissue homeostasis will be analyzed by lineage tracing experiments. Next, mouse and human organoid culture systems of FT and HGSOC will be generated. Mutating normal FT organoids in specific genes, using the CRISPR/Cas9 system, will enable following putative SCs tumorigenic capacity upon their injection to mice. Furthermore, it will generate an innovative in-vitro model of ovarian cancer development. Finally, HGSOC organoids will be used to model and follow chemotherapy resistance acquisition.

Mots clés : ovarian cancer, fallopian tube stem cells, organoids

Participants :
- Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 177598.8 €
Projet NANODENDRITE (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : SIGNED

High-energy density batteries based on metal anodes (Li, Na, K) are urgently required to meet the demands of modern electric vehicles. However, their commercial success has been impeded by the uncontrolled dendritic growth, which causes serious capacity losses and safety issues. Understanding the mechanisms of dendrite formation, which still remain unclear, would be a critical breakthrough to achieve high-performance metal anode batteries. This proposal presents an innovative new approach to provide a holistic understanding of metal dendrite formation and mitigation beyond the state-of-the-art that will accelerate the rational design of ideal anode materials, through the implementation of quantitative electrochemical microscopy techniques, co-located structural microscopy and computational modelling. The scientific scope encompasses gaining definitive insights on dendrite formation and mitigation by: (i) revealing precise conditions and intricate nucleation and growth events governing dendrite formation during the electrodeposition of Li, Na, K and Mg at the nanoscale using a unique high-throughput electrochemistry platform; (ii) visualising nanoscale electrochemistry at nano-engineered electrode surfaces to unveil how nucleation sites work together to achieve dendrite mitigation; (iii) correlating nanoscale knowledge of dendrite formation and mitigation to the performance of a macroscale battery through the rational design of anode materials. The project brings together the unique expertise of the Fellow, Dr. Daniel Martín-Yerga, in electrochemistry and nanoscience with that of the Host group, world-leading on correlative electrochemical microscopy and modelling, to create an approach that will greatly advance the battery field. The Fellow will acquire exceptional scientific and transferable skills, with world-class support from the Host group and its collaborators, providing him with an outstanding opportunity to develop personally and professionally.

Mots clés : electrodeposition, electrochemical imaging, scanning probe microscopy, metal nucleation and growth, batteries, metal anodes

Participants :
- University of Warwick (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 224933.76 €