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

Iron (Fe) is an essential micronutrient for the productivity of crops and the quality of their derived products. Fe deficiency-induced anemia affects billions of people worldwide. This could be mitigated by improving the capacity of plants to absorb and store Fe, which will help to provide adequate dietary Fe to the growing global population. Decrypting the molecular mechanisms plants have evolved to acquire Fe from the soil is essential for reaching this objective. Recently, the secretion in the soil of root-borne coumarins has emerged as a key factor affecting Fe uptake in non-grass species. However, the mechanisms that modulate coumarin storage and trafficking within plant roots are not well understood. The candidate has coupled microarray data mining with in vivo coumarin transport assays and identified four novel Arabidopsis coumarin transporters, namely NPF7.2, NPF2.3, NPF2.4 and NPF2.5. The objective of this project is to determine the precise function of each of these four transporters in coumarin trafficking and plant Fe nutrition. In work package 1 (WP1), the coumarin transport activities of NPF candidates will be examined in detail using yeast cells and Xenopus oocytes. Moreover, we will generate single (insertion/transposon lines) and multiple (CRISPR/Cas9) mutants in order to precisely define the role of each NPF in plant roots. Next, in vivo imaging of coumarin and NFP candidate protein localization will be conducted to ascertain the role of each candidate in the spatiotemporal distribution of coumarins within the roots (WP2). Finally, the posttranslational regulation of the NPF candidates will be investigated using proteomic approaches (WP3). The proposed project is both feasible and appropriate for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, since the expected outcomes are innovative and will generate knowledge for both fundamental and industrial research, while the candidate will improve his skills and knowledge in a specialized research area.

Mots clés : iron, plant nutrition, secondary metabolite, coumarins, transport, npf transporter, agricultural science

Participants :
- Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 196707.84 €
Projet REPONANO (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Iron (hydr)oxides are widely considered as important factors for the immobilisation of many contaminants, while their nano-scale counterparts offer greater retention capacity. Successful immobilisation of contaminants is documented, for instance, via nanomagnetite, although this solid is far less studied compared to other Fe oxides. Soil aggregates are natural systems ideal for the study of the (bio)geochemical reactions that control the mobility of the redox sensitive elements due to their small size and their spatial heterogeneity. The reduction of contaminants by Fe (hydr)oxides using artificial aggregate systems has been studied via experimental set ups that mimic the field conditions, showing the great retention potential of important toxic pollutants. These systems have been originally developed in a macro-scale via flow-through reactors using constructed aggregates coated with ferryhydrite and indicated the successful retention of Se and As. Thus, the purpose of the present study is to use those systems in a micro-scale edition via the use of microfluidics and PEG aggregates in order to study the nanomagnetite immobilisation potential of various contaminated systems (i.e. Se, As, Cr, Sb, U). We aim to obtain Break Through Curves (BTC) of the contaminants of interest to investigate the spatial distribution of the phases produced by nanomagnetite reduction and to assess all the driving geochemical and physical processes. Micro X-Ray Tomography (SR-CT) and µXAS will be applied for the first time to such experimental systems, offering a 3D description of the various species present in these aggregates. A numerical (3D) reactive transport model will be, also, used to interpretate the time-resolved data obtained in such a natural system and to set up new water treatments based on such macroscopic devices. We aim to provide innovative insights and set the basis for alternative remediation techniques with respect to drinking and waste water contamination worldwide.

Mots clés : water contamination, remediation technique, nanomagnetite aggregates, microfluidics, micro x ray tomography

Participants :
- Université Grenoble Alpes (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 196707.84 €
Projet GendeResearchIreland (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

It has been shown that gender equality interventions in the higher education sector are vital in addressing career advancement challenges facing female academics and researchers, in particular the higher up the career ladder researchers progress. This proposed research would explore a gender equality intervention, Athena SWAN, which seeks to encourage commitment to advancing the careers of women in science. It has been shown that barriers to career advancement are mainly due to institutional factors, rather than individual ones, such as career drive or skill. Strengthening research and innovation in Europe, with respect to encouraging gender diversity to support science excellence and relevance, is an identified priority of Horizon 2020. This proposed study would explore the response to, and processes of, the Athena SWAN programme in one European country, Ireland. With a number of EC funded projects in Europe, and research growing, the time is ripe for conducting this research and informing the developing theoretical and policy context for gender equality in higher education in Europe. Athena SWAN is a new intervention in Ireland (since 2015) and this novelty in the process, alongside the context of change within institutions, would elicit a wealth of qualitative data findings that would be generalisable across European institutions. Given my expertise in qualitative research methods and participation in a FP7 gender equality project, I am in the best position to restart my career in this field of inquiry, within a highly stimulating and renowned social science research environment. Supporting this original research would result in a wealth of useful findings for peer researchers, the policy sector and the wider research and innovation community in Europe, as well as engaging with the public. I would seek to promote the Fellowship with a zeal reflecting the sentiment of the extraordinary woman in science who inspired this programme, Dr. Marie Skłodowska-Curie.

Mots clés : gender equality intervention, higher education

Participants :
- National University of Ireland (Irlande) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 187866.0 €
Projet LFC-MORE (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

It is a long-held dream of physical chemists to not only study, but also fully control chemical reactions. The research aim of this project is to control such reactions using the photon catalysis method. This technique uses a focused, high-power, non-resonant pulsed laser to create a high electric field. This field can interact with the dipole it induces in a molecule. With this so-called dynamic Stark effect, we can alter energy levels and potential energy surfaces of the molecule under study and thereby control the chemistry in the system. Our first goal is to apply this relatively new and state-of-the-art technique to control the chemistry in a small benchmark molecule. This will serve as a proof-of-principle experiment and give us a better understanding of the technique and the molecular mechanisms it affects. Afterwards, our aim is to control conical intersections in relatively large biochemically relevant molecules and to create light-field assisted molecular switches. The experiments will be conducted in a molecular-beam machine. Three lasers will interact with the molecules. The first one will provide the high electric field to control the chemistry, the second laser will excite the molecules and thereby start the chemical reaction, and the third one will ionize the reaction products. The resulting ions and electrons will be recorded using the velocity map imaging technique. We will use state-of-the-art combinations of detection methods to elucidate the controlled chemical reactions in a very high level of detail. The photon catalysis method has the potential to become a relatively easy to implement and general technique that could advance many experiments from the level of understanding to the level of controlling molecular processes. It allows us to manipulate properties of matter at the molecular level and it could become an important tool in the fields of quantum information, molecular nanotechnology, and photopharmacology, for instance.

Mots clés : molecular beam, lasers, photon catalysis, velocity map imaging, photodissociation, dynamic stark effect, molecular switches

Participants :
- Radboud University Nijmegen (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 175572.48 €
Projet MICRO-MACRO-ILC (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

It is poorly understood how macrophages interact with other cells and commensal microbes (microbiota) to achieve the balance between barrier immunity and tissue homeostasis in the lung. Novel experimental systems are required to investigate the interaction between macrophages, innate lymphoid cells (ILC), and the microbiota since the immune system, inflammatory responses, and microbiota differ between mice and humans. However, studies in humans are limited by ethical constraints. To overcome this limitation, I will use mice with a human immune system (humanized mice) that are colonized with a human microbiota. The supervisor Dr. Willinger has drastically improved humanized mice by providing critical human factors through knock-in gene replacement. Using this unique tool, I will test the hypothesis that signals from the human microbiota regulate lung immune function through effects on alveolar macrophages and ILC and pursue the following objectives: (1) Define the role of human monocytes/macrophages in the homeostasis of lung ILC; (2) Determine how the human microbiota regulates lung macrophages and ILC; (3) Dissect the role of human monocytes/macrophages in lung inflammation. To achieve these aims, I will employ the state-of-the-art model to reconstitute the human lung immune system and microbiota in the mouse. I will deplete human alveolar macrophages and monocyte subsets to determine how these cells regulate ILC differentiation and lung inflammation. This will be complemented by studies in germ-free humanized mice colonized with a human lung microbiota to investigate immune regulatory effects of the local microbiota. The project will generate critical new insights into the human microbiota-macrophage-ILC crosstalk that cannot be obtained with other experimental approaches. My multidisciplinary approach involving humanized mice, immunology, and germ-free studies has the potential to discover novel approaches to treat human lung disease.

Mots clés : humanized mice, macrophage, innate lymphoid cell, microbiota

Participants :
- Karolinska Institutet (Suède) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 185857.2 €
Projet KaonToALP (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

It is proposed to perform the first search for production of a short-lived axion-like particle (ALP) in charged-kaon decays (K+ --> pi+a), which decaying promptly into a di-photon final state, using world's largest data set of charged kaon decays collected by the NA62 experiment at CERN in 2016-18. New powerful constraint on the ALP phase space will be established; a possible ALP discovery would be a breakthrough in particle physics. To achieve credible results on the ALP search, it is mandatory to understand the main Standard Model background process K+ --> pi+ gamma gamma. Therefore a comprehensive study of this process is also proposed, including a re-analysis of the inputs to the description of this decay within Chiral Perturbation Theory, and the most precise measurement of this process to date. This measurement by itself represents an important test of the theories describing low-energy dynamics. These novel measurements are based on an existing data sample collected recently, thereby minimizing the associated risks.

Mots clés : rare decays, kaon decays, axion like particle

Participants :
- University of Birmingham (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 212933.76 €
Projet FPGA Accelerators (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

It is reported that data centers today consume up to 3 percent of the global electricity usage. This is expected to increase in the upcoming years as the amount of data processed in the cloud increases substantially. An effective way for data centers to achieve better performance and energy efficiency is to perform computation on specialized processing elements. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) enable customization of logic after manufacturing to achieve better energy efficiency compared to general purpose processors. Today, prominent hardware and software companies are investing in data center solutions that integrate FPGAs with CPUs, and significant energy consumption and performance improvements have been demonstrated for several data center applications. However, the main barrier for wide spread adoption of FGPAs in data centers is the cost of programming, which typically requires months of development time by hardware designers. This makes it unaffordable for small-to-medium software companies to effectively utilize the available FPGAs. The purpose of this project is to lower this barrier for emerging graph analytics applications for knowledge discovery and machine learning. The basic idea is to use an abstract interface that allows a domain expert to describe an application as a set of serial functions defined per vertex and/or edge. We propose a customizable implementation template that automatically maps the abstract user functions to massively parallel FPGA implementations. The proposed template will hide from users many low level implementation details such as parallelization, pipelining, synchronization, memory access optimization, race and deadlock avoidance, etc. This will help bridge the gap between high level application descriptions and costly hardware implementations. Our preliminary architecture simulations have shown that the proposed graph processors can achieve significantly better energy efficiency than general purpose processors.

Mots clés : heterogeneous architectures, field programmable gate arrays, hardware accelerators, graph analytics, energy efficient computing, high performance computing

Participants :
- Bilkent University (Turquie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 145845.6 €
Projet HOPESEE (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

It is well established that pathogens invade plant cells to establish an infection. Part of a biotrophic pathogen’s infection strategy is to secrete effectors into host cells in order to manipulate host processes to the pathogen’s benefit. It has been observed that some effectors can move from cell-to-cell in the host and this suggests that a pathogen can invade and exploit cells surrounding the immediate infection site. To further support this hypothesis, my host lab observed that PAMP-induced plasmodesmata (PD) closure is suppressed in some virulent infections, suggesting pathogens attempt to keep intercellular connections open; some pathogens must maintain intercellular symplastic connectivity by counteracting PAMP-induced PD closure to promote disease. This proposes the question: why does a pathogen want PD open? We hypothesise that open PD allow pathogen effectors to move into non-infected cells where they targeting host processes to promote infection and allow pathogen access host resources such as sugars. In this study, I will use the Hyaloperonospora arabidopsidis– Arabidopsis interaction to identify cell-to-cell mobile effectors and their host targets. I will identify global changes of host gene regulation that are associated with cell-to-cell mobile effectors and examine the effect of cell-to-cell mobile effectors on sucrose transport around an infection site. The results will give insight into how pathogens exploit the symplast and non-infected cells to promote infection, characterising a poorly considered element of plant-pathogen interactions.

Mots clés : plant pathogen interaction, plasmodesmata, effector, symplast, inter cellular communitcation

Participants :
- UK Research and Innovation (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 195454.8 €
Projet SUMO-ZNHIT6-snoRNPs (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

It is widely accepted that eukaryotic cells contain large populations of small nucleolar RNA-protein complexes (snoRNPs), which mediate the modification of rRNA nucleotides and facilitate cleavage of rRNA precursors. Thus, they may control general protein translation by regulating the level and function of ribosomes. It is currently thought that understanding the process of snoRNP biogenesis will provide the knowledge indispensable to determine their exact function and means of regulation. Although, it is known that SUMO-mediated protein modifications are crucial for snoRNP functions, the E3 responsible for this process as well as their precise targets, or time and space frame of the modification are not known. Preliminary results of the host group obtained by novel proteomic approaches demonstrated that proteins of box C/D snoRNP complex undergo SUMOylation and that BCD1/ZNHIT6 might be a new SUMO E3 ligase responsible for these modifications. The specific aim of this study is to demonstrate whether ZNHIT6 indeed is a SUMO E3 ligase, to identify its substrates and reveal the function of BCD1-mediated SUMOylation of these targets in the regulation of RNA metabolism. For that purpose, I will be trained in a number of state-of the-art techniques. Notably, I will create a series of cell lines depleted of BCD1 or expressing its tagged versions using CRISPR/Cas technology. The role of ZNHIT6 in RNA metabolism will be analysed by classical biological methods, such as: IF, WB, FACS. In addition, I will use new mass spectrometry based approach designed by the host lab for the detection of SUMOylated targets. A wide range of in vitro assays will also be used to determine interactions and SUMO E3 ligase activity of ZNHIT6. The innovative character of this proposal lies in the complementarity of research techniques used and the participants involved for studying this biological question and will provide insights into the cross talk between SUMOylation and RNA metabolism.

Mots clés : sumoylation, sumo e3 ligases, rna metabolism, snornp

Participants :
- University of Dundee (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 195454.8 €
Projet juliaeconometrics (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Economic Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Julia is a new programming language started at MIT, with a strong focus on numerical computing. Its key advantage compared to languages like R and Python is that Julia is (just in time) compiled, rather than interpreted. As a consequence, Julia effectively combines the convenience of these high level languages with the speed of compiled low level languages such as C++ or Fortran. Speed of execution is critical in many applications, including but not limited to those involving big data. One critical aspect of any scientific programming language is its ecosystem, that is, the collection of libraries which implement common scientific functionality. In Julia, these take the form of packages. Packages are contributed by the user community and hosted in an online repository. They can be conveniently installed from within the language itself, similar to R and its CRAN network. Currently there are more than 1000 packages listed. The aim of the project proposed here is to build a Financial Econometrics package for Julia, as this functionality is presently absent. This package would become part of the official repository, and hopefully become the standard way of doing financial econometrics in Julia. Like Julia itself, the results of the project would be available under an open source license, an important aspect of open science. Open source software, via R and Python, has already made inroads into scientific computing, but financial econometrics is still a stronghold of commercial closed-source products like Matlab. This project will offer researchers in the field an alternative.

Mots clés : garch, high frequency data, julia, matlab, python

Participants :
- University of Zurich (Suisse) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 187419.6 €
Projet KARhet (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Kainate receptors (KARs) are glutamate-gated ion channels (iGluRs) known as neuronal circuit modulators. Because of their involvement in epilepsy and mood disorders, they represent an important pharmacological target. Over the past decade, we have learned a lot about synaptic KARs, but their assembly, function and pharmacology remain elusive compared to the closely-related alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid receptor (AMPAR). During my PhD, I used electrophysiology to study the functional properties of KARs and AMPARs associated with auxiliary proteins to gain insights into their roles at neuronal synapses. In the proposed research project, I plan to use structural methods such as X-ray crystallography and single-particle cryo-electron microscopy and tomography to address the questions brought by my PhD thesis work. Specifically, I will combine the functional knowledge and skills that I have acquired with the structural expertise of the host laboratory to inquire about the structural assembly of synaptic KARs and especially the interactions between the different KAR subunits and their synaptic binding partners. Combined with the functional analysis of these interactions, this work will provide valuable information for a deeper understanding of synaptic complexes at the molecular level.

Mots clés : synapse, ligand gated ion channel, glutamate receptor

Participants :
- UK Research and Innovation (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 183454.8 €