Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet Catenin-Condensation (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The Wnt-signaling pathway is a key determinant of cell identity and proliferation. However, when aberrantly activated it drives malignant cell proliferation in gastrointestinal cancer, breast cancer, melanoma and leukemia. The key effector protein of the Wnt pathway is β-catenin, which is continuously degraded in unstimulated cells, but in stimulated cells it accumulates and translocates to the nucleus where it activates transcription. A growing body of literature indicates that transcription factors and co-activators interact through the formation of biomolecular condensates. These are membraneless organelles that concentrate and compartmentalise components through weak, but multivalent interactions. Recently, I have shown that β-catenin forms condensates with Mediator co-activator to specifically activate transcription. However, how this new mode of β-catenin interactions influences the rest of the Wnt-pathway is currently unknown. The overarching goal of this proposal is to uncover how β-catenin condensation impacts the Wnt-signaling pathway. I will investigate the consequences of β-catenin condensation for its cytoplasmic regulation by the destruction complex, study how it affects β-catenin co-factor interactions in the nucleus and determine the effect of oncogenic Wnt-signaling on β-catenin condensates. The proposed work will uncover if β-catenin condensation has a function in the Wnt-signaling pathway outside the nucleus, its effect on co-factor interactions and elucidate how it might contribute to cancer etiology. Deeper understanding of the fundamental Wnt-signaling pathway will have a profound impact on our comprehension of embryonic development, adult regeneration and cancer.

Mots clés : phase separation, biomolecular condensates, wnt signaling

Participants :
- University Medical Center Utrecht (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 187572.48 €
Projet WORK-CHRIST (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The Work-Christ project intends to reconstruct the influence of religious radicalisation on the social conflict in Mediterranean European countries, with particular attention paid to the cases in France, Spain and Italy during the sixties and seventies. The main purpose of this research is to study the relationship between religion and politics in the period following the Second Vatican Council, via the study of the "Young Christian Workers Movement", better known by the French name Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne. This is a field of research which is totally unexplored, both regarding the interactions among the different national offshoots of the movement and the transnational reality represented by the coordinating authority of the Jeunesse Ouvrière catholique internationale. The research will also take into account the network constituted by the Mouvement Mondial des Travailleurs Chrétiens (MMTC) to which the specialized branches of the working class Catholic Action organisations referred to. From the late sixties, the Christian workers’ associations became the terminal point of the tensions, ferment and expectations that arose from the Second Vatican Council. In addition, these associations played an essential role in the processes of transition and consolidation of democracy in the three nations taken into consideration. For these reasons, the “Young Christian Workers Movement” appears to be a case study of the utmost importance for the role played on a European scale as a workshop for the building of a radicalized young identity challenging societal norms. Work-Christ has 3 key objectives: 1. through research based on archive sources, address the innovative subject of international Christian workers’ youth associations; 2. adopt a multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective for studying religious radicalisation; 3. study the mobilisation of the Christian workers associations at transnational level, reconstructing the phases, the goals and the contents.

Mots clés : religious radicalisation, political radicalisation, faith, catholicism, mediterranean europe, social conflict, democracy, working class, transnational, secularisation, de secularisation

Participants :
- Fondation nationale des sciences politiques (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 173076.0 €
Projet RoCS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The ability of the human species to share information with others is unique due to the fascinating expressivity of human communicative actions. The primary aim of the present proposal is to investigate the biological basis of this ability to reveal 1) the evolutionary foundations and 2) the neural underpinnings of it, which makes humans able to understand the meaning of communicative signal sequences. To test the first question, I will investigate whether a non-human animal species can recognize and prefer acoustic signals that are indicative of communicative information transfer in domestic chicks. To examine the second question, I will conduct two EEG experiments with young human infants to find specific neural markers of communication and to prove that communication can elicit high-level inferences about agency. In all experiments, I will rely on my recent results published in high-ranked, multidisciplinary journals, which show that the variability of signal sequences in turn-taking interactions is interpreted by human infants as indicative of communicative information transfer – even if the signals and the communicators are unfamiliar to them. The Centre for Mind/Brain Sciences and the supervision of Professor Vallortigara offers the perfect infrastructure and professional background to investigate both the comparative and the psychophysiological questions of the proposed project at the same time. Thus, the examination of the neural underpinnings of the sensitivity to communicative information transfer and the evolutionary ancient cognitive mechanisms behind it will enable to understand the biological foundations of human communication, which is not possible without testing non-linguistic and pre-linguistic participants. The findings of the present proposal can be highly relevant in cognitive and comparative psychology, linguistics and pragmatics and in applied sciences such as natural language processing, pedagogy or communication studies.

Mots clés : developmental psychology, comparative psychology, preverbal infants, domestic chicks, communication

Participants :
- University of Trento (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183473.28 €
Projet FrogsInSpace (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The ability to navigate the environment has a profound impact on animal survival and reproductive success. Sex and species differences in spatial abilities are widespread, but understanding the mechanisms underlying variation in spatial cognition and how these differences arise through evolution remains challenging. I propose an interdisciplinary project aimed at understanding the sex and species differences in spatial cognition of tropical poison frogs from ecological, cognitive, neurobiological, and evolutionary perspectives. Poison frogs are ideal for understanding the evolution and neural mechanisms of vertebrate spatial cognition because sexes and closely related species show contrasting life histories and spatial behaviors. Specifically, species differ in whether females or males provide parental care to tadpoles and have larger home ranges. This offers a rare opportunity to link the sex and species differences in life history with differences in spatio-cognitive abilities at the behavioral and the neural levels. Recently, I have used tracking to study variation in frog space use, developed assays for quantifying navigational performance under natural conditions, and demonstrated that poison frogs rely on spatial memory for navigation. Building on this groundwork, I will collaborate with experts in behavioral neuroscience and movement ecology to (1) reveal sex and species differences in poison frog spatial cognition, (2) identify neural mechanisms governing sex differences in spatial cognition using cutting-edge neuroscience tools, and (3) integrate ecological, behavioral, and neural aspects of poison frog spatial behavior using modeling. FrogsInSpace is an ambitious yet realistic project that will establish a novel study system and integrate a broad range of expertise to address important questions in comparative cognition. It will be critical for my development as an expert working at the interface between animal ecology, cognition, and neurobiology.

Mots clés : spatial cognition, movement ecology, sex differences, neuroethology, neuroecology, amphibians

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 257619.84 €
- Stanford University (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet DeepTextNet (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The academic community and the pharmaceutical industry use omics technologies to produce big data at an incredibly increasing rate but are faced with major challenges when it comes to their interpretation. Key for this interpretation is the association between individual entities, which in a biological context means creating molecular networks. These associations cannot be derived from the omics data alone, but rely heavily on pre-generated networks created by text mining of millions of scientific articles. One of the most popular sources of such networks is the STRING database, which currently serves ~100,000 users monthly. Many of these users work with omics data and a major obstacle, which limits potential benefits for them, is that literature-derived networks are made up of "functional associations", stating only that two molecules do something together, but neither the interaction type nor the direction. Hence, our hypothesis is that state-of-the-art computational approaches will be able to exploit new possibilities in network biology that emerge from big data. The key objective of DeepTextNet is to extract novel information from the biomedical literature on the type and direction of gene/protein associations. Specifically, a new paradigm will be realized by building a next generation text mining technology for relation extraction of molecular interactions that explicitly utilizes deep learning and, in contrast to current methodology, makes use of big data for training as opposed to small manually curated datasets. This new strategy for obtaining comprehensive molecular networks with both type and direction for the interactions is precisely what is currently missing for the interpretation of omics data. We expect the impact to be high and wide, as on top of applying this strategy on omics datasets as part of the project, the new technology will feed directly into STRING, which is used globally and integrated into workflows in both academia and industry.

Mots clés : network biology, deep learning, machine learning, text mining, omics data

Participants :
- University of Copenhagen (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 207312.0 €
Projet AMYGDALA-ELECTROPHYS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The accurate perception and interpretation of social stimuli is crucial for survival in social species including rodents, primates and humans. Before deciding whether to mate, fight or avoid, an animal must process multisensory cues to activate an internal representation of the social environment that answers key questions (Sex? Age? Friend? Foe? Previously encountered?). Little is known about how the brain develops and activates this representation. We will focus on the role of neuronal firing in the basolateral amygdala complex (BLA) in processing and integrating social cues. In the first stage of this research, we will use neuropixel silicon probes to conduct large-scale recordings of the BLA in rats during social interaction with conspecifics (juvenile rats, male rats and female rats). We can record from large populations of neurons across weeks in freely-moving rats during social interaction. Second, by analysing the activity of single neurons in the BLA, we can characterize the specificity and responsivity of single neurons to social interaction and understand the mitigating factors (gender of conspecific, sexual receptivity, age, previous history). Third, we can decode the population activity of the BLA during social activity to understand how BLA connectivity changes during social interaction and with experience. Finally, we will use optical tagging of anatomically-defined ensembles of BLA neurons to understand how BLA projections code for specific properties of social activity. Success in this project will provide an understanding of how neural computation occurs within the BLA.


Participants :
- University of London (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 224933.76 €
Projet CITSCI (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : European Researchers' Night
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The active participation of citizens in science related issues has significantly increased in the past decades and citizen science is top-priority in many institutions and governments across Europe. Portugal, however, is still lagging a little behind. This proposal for the European Researcher’s Night 2014 and 2015 in Portugal – CITSCI – has two broad aims. First, CITSCI aims at addressing this national insufficiency, through i) the active mobilisation of university researchers, science museum professionals, municipal authorities and the civil society (associations, NGOs) and ii) the compilation and broader dissemination of what is already being done in terms of citizenship-based research activities in Portugal. It is hoped that these activities become more mainstream in Portugal after CITSCI. Secondly, in Portugal the relations between contemporary science, socio-economic development, environmental sustainability, and employment, are not yet clearly perceived by the public. Through a broad range of scientific activities, CITSCI aims at raising awareness of the role of research in the citizens daily lives and encourage their direct and active participation in the construction of scientific knowledge. Special attention will be given to the engagement of minorities, citizens with special needs and women. The University of Lisbon (ULisboa), through its National Museum of Natural History and Science (MUHNAC), coordinates CITSCI. It will mobilise, together with the University of Coimbra, the research community, science centres, NGOs, and local authorities to act as associated partners in their respective regions. The proposal will also have the Municipality of Lisbon as partner, which will play an important role in mobilizing the participation of citizens, local companies and associations, as well as the regional and national media. The Municipality of Lisbon and the NGOs will have a very important role in the co-organization of the build-up and outdoor activities.

Mots clés : citizen science, researchers, society, science communication, innovation, future

Participants :
- University of Lisbon (Portugal) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 60437.5 €
- Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (Portugal) — Partner, beneficiary, Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche), subvention : 21250.0 €
- University of Coimbra (Portugal) — Partner, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 40362.5 €
Projet MultiSens (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The aim of MultiSens is to develop a revolutionary quality indicator platform for the food industry. This innovative intelligent packaging platform will alert the customer of the meat quality adding value and benefits across the food packaging supply chain, reducing waste, providing valuable end user feedback and help Europe maintain a market competitive advantage. In the EU alone, food waste along the supply chain has been estimated at approximately 89 million tonnes or 180 kg per capita per year, and is expected to rise to 126 million tonnes a year by 2020, unless action is taken. Currently households produce the largest share of EU food waste (42%) and experts estimate that reducing food waste at consumer level in developed countries by 30% could save roughly 400,000 sq/km2 of cropland by 2030. Normally, food products are packed in a Modified Atmosphere (MA), which consists of a mixture of gases optimised for the food being packaged. Tracking the composition inside the packages can be checked if this MA has been consistent or if the produce has already started to deteriorate. However, a non-destructive method for determining this MA has not, as yet, been reported. This project proposes to exploit the development and integration of a multi-membrane sensor in meat packages using imaging and communication capabilities of smart devices for freshness detection while employing innovative packaging methods for sensor integration. If the sensor is placed within / or on the package in such a way that it is in intimate contact with the packaged meat headspace, it will allow the monitoring of key gases within its surroundings and relay information about the quality of the meat. The economic and social impact of such a platform, even if reducing food produce waste by 10%, would be significant. The novelty of this project lies in high-quality sensor preparation, the innovative methods for sensors immobilisation and the easy, non-destructive method for detection.

Mots clés : quality indicator, gas sensors, food safety, printable sensors, 3d sensing platforms

Participants :
- University of Granada (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 170121.6 €
Projet ReFocuS 2.0 (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : European Researchers' Night
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The aim of Road to Friday of Science (ReFocuS 2.0) project is to refocus and promote the value of cultural heritage and natural resources to society and highlight the important role that communities play in preserving and managing their cultural heritage and natural environment. The potential that cultural heritage offers is enormous, and beneficial to everyone. Following the EU and UNESCO tendencies and guidelines which recognize the importance of cultural and natural heritage as an indicator and facilitator of the social development, we refocus public attention to synergy of education, cultural and natural heritage, and sustainable development. The other aim of the project is to pay more attention to: academics to share their knowledge and work with broader public and this way to provide effective heritage education, young people to keep the national treasures and protect national heritage, and general audience to be aware of cultural diversity as a fundamental component of sustainable development. The ReFocuS project named “Past means Future” consists of two parts: Night 2018 will be focused on “Past”, while Night 2019 will be focused on “Future”. Cultural heritage and natural resources are based on aspects of our past that we cherish, want to keep and pass on to future generations and outside world. Researchers will participate in a wide range of activities developed for and aimed at young people and adults. The activities will take place in venues such as old streets and houses, museums, archaeological sites, fortress, science clubs, and libraries in twelve Serbian cities with the aim of showing the relevance of their work to our everyday lives as well as engaging ordinary people with research and bringing research to unusual places. Workshops, lectures, exhibitions, conversations and film screening about the cultural and natural heritage of Serbia will be organized within the local Science Clubs.

Mots clés : past, future, cultural and natural heritage

Participants :
- Zavod za zastitu spomenika kulture kragujevac (Serbie) — Partner, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 28000.0 €
- Prirodno matematicki fakultet (Serbie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 61000.0 €
- Institut za bioloska istrazivanja (Serbie) — Partner, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 55000.0 €
- Centar za Promociju Nauke (Serbie) — Partner, beneficiary, Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche), subvention : 46000.0 €
Projet WORM_SLEEP (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The aim of my research is to unravel one of the biggest unresolved problems in neuroscience: the function of sleep. Sleep is an essential aspect of our lives, the importance of which appears clear in pathological conditions where its normal patterns are disrupted. Moreover, it is an evolutionary conserved phenomenon. It has been described and characterized at levels, ranging from behavioural to neural and molecular, in different animal species. Despite its conservation, pointing to a fundamental function in animal survival, the reason for sleep is still debated. Different hypotheses have been raised, such as the energy hypothesis, the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis, and the clearance hypothesis; there is evidence to support each. However, no conclusive agreement on the main reason why sleep evolved has been reached. This is mainly due to the difficulty in integrating the above-mentioned levels of characterization in a single model organism. I will overcome this limitation by studying sleep homeostasis in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Since sleep is a global process spanning the entire brain, full understanding of its regulations requires investigation at levels ranging from molecular mechanisms in single cells to brain-wide network activity. This is currently achievable only in C. elegans, providing a small anatomically mapped nervous system, advanced genetic tools, and a novel whole-brain imaging approach with single-cell resolution that was developed in my host lab. I will leverage on this approach, as well as a new quantitative behavioural paradigm for sleep homeostasis in adult worms, to study the brain-wide effects of sleep deprivation. To unravel the essential function of sleep, I aim to: I: Characterize adult C. elegans sleep by quantitative behavioural analysis and whole brain imaging. II: Identify the neural signature of sleep deprivation. III: Isolate the final signal communicating sleep propensity to sleep-promoting centres.

Mots clés : invertebrate neuroscience, calcium imaging, brain wide imaging, caenorhabditis elegans, sleep homeostasis, sleep deprivation, sleep dynamics, synapse homeostasis, brain energetics

Participants :
- Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (Autriche) — Partner, beneficiary, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 27692.8 €
- University of Vienna (Autriche) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 138464.0 €