Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CLAUSTRUM (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Hebrew University of Jerusalem — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HUJI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1995000.0 €

Our senses face a constant barrage of information. Hence, understanding how our brain enables us to attend to relevant stimuli, while ignoring distractions, is of increasing biomedical importance. Recently, I discovered that the claustrum, a multi-sensory hub and recipient of extensive neuromodulatory input, enables resilience to distraction. In my ERC project, I will explore the mechanisms underlying claustral mediation of resilience to distraction and develop novel approaches for assessing and modulating attention in mice, with implications for humans. Transgenic mouse models that I identified as enabling selective access to claustral neurons overcome its limiting anatomy, making the claustrum accessible to functional investigation. Using this novel genetic access, I obtained preliminary results strongly suggesting that the claustrum functions to filter distractions by adjusting cortical sensory gain. My specific aims are: 1) To delineate the mechanisms whereby the claustrum achieves sensory gain control, by applying in-vivo cell-attached, multi-unit and fiber photometry recordings from claustral and cortical neurons during attention-demanding tasks. 2) To discriminate between the functions of the claustrum in multi-sensory integration and implementation of attention strategies, by employing multi-sensory behavioral paradigms while modulating claustral function. 3) To develop validated complementary physiological and behavioral protocols for adjusting claustral mediation of attention via neuromodulation. This study is unique in its focus and aims: it will provide a stringent neurophysiological framework for defining a key mechanism underlying cognitive concepts of attention, and establish a novel platform for studying the function of the claustrum and manipulating its activity. The project is designed to achieve breakthroughs of fundamental nature and potentially lead to diagnostic and therapeutic advances relevant to attention disorders.

Mots-clés : claustrum,attention,distraction,neural circuits,behavior,electrophysiology,transgenic mice,viruses
Projet ERC : ConflictedPrediction (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : U. London
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 237168.25 €

Our sensory receptors are bombarded with noisy, continuous streams of information. From these streams, our brains must construct percepts that are (1) veridical representations of the world, and (2) informative – i.e., highlighting what we did not already know. Cognitive science has suggested that our brain meets these challenges by using probabilistic expectations to shape our perceptual experiences. However, there are currently two broad classes of theory concerning how expectations shape perception, that are both supported by large bodies of evidence and mutually incompatible: some theories propose that we upweight what we expect to generate veridical representations, whereas others propose that we downweight what we expect to privilege the most ‘newsworthy’ information. ConflictedPrediction will test a new theory addressing and solving this paradox for the first time, to determine how perception can be rendered both veridical and informative. I propose that probabilistic knowledge pre-emptively biases perception towards what is likely, to generate largely veridical experiences rapidly. However, if the input is particularly surprising, catecholamine release – acting to aid learning – reactively enhances perception of these inputs by modulating sensory gain. This perceptual enhancement will generate a clearer estimate of these highly unexpected events to guide model-updating. To test the theory, ConflictedPrediction will use temporally- and spatially- sensitive neural measures (EEG, MEG, 7T fMRI), in combination with computationally derived parameters of perception and unexpectedness. This interdisciplinary project therefore will unify understanding of perception and learning across typically isolated scientific domains. Its findings will chart a new research frontier for understanding how the brain surmounts key computational challenges, enabling us to survive and thrive in a challenging sensory world.

Mots-clés : perception,prediction,expectation
Projet ERC : MECHIDENT (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Newcastle University — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1995677.0 €

Our social interactions and survival critically depend on identifying specific individuals to interact with or avoid (“who is that?”). Identifying individuals can be achieved by different sensory inputs, and by many accounts any sensory input elicits a representation of an individual that somehow becomes transmodal or independent of any sensory system. However, how the brain achieves transmodal integration facilitating individual recognition remains a mystery: Investigations in humans allowing direct access to site-specific neuronal processes are generally rare and have not focused on understanding neuronal multisensory integration for person recognition. Also, animal models to study the neuronal mechanisms of related processes have only recently become known. I propose to use direct recordings of neuronal activity in both humans and monkeys during face- and voice-identification tasks, combined with site-specific manipulation of the sensory input streams into the lateral anterior temporal lobe (ATL). The ATL brings together identity-specific content from the senses but the neuronal mechanisms for this convergence are entirely unknown. My core hypothesis is that auditory voice- or visual face-identity input into key ATL convergence sites elicits a sensory-modality invariant representation, which once elicited is robust to degradation or inactivation of neuronal input from the other sense. The central aim is to test this in human patients being monitored for surgery and to directly compare and link the results with those in monkeys where the neuronal circuit and mechanisms can be revealed using optogenetic control of neuronal responses. Analyses will assess neuronal dynamics and sensory integration frameworks. This proposal is poised to unravel how the brain combines multisensory input critical for identifying individuals and cognitive operations to act upon. The basic science insights gained may inform efforts to stratify patients with different types of ATL damage.

Mots-clés : human,primate,identity perception,neurophysiology,mechanisms,neurons,monkey,attention,cognition
Projet ERC : REVIVE (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Tübingen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999875.0 €

Our species evolutionary success story is intriguing. For over a century, we have been trying to formulate a narrative for the evolutionary and migration steps our ancestors took and made us who we are today. Several decades ago, our narrative for our lineage’s dispersals from our place of origin, Africa, across the globe, was based on two separate big waves: one with Homo erectus at ca. 1 million years ago and the second with modern humans 60-50 thousand years ago. However, recent archaeological, paleoanthropological, and genetic evidence has forced us to alter this narrative to one which favors more dynamic geographic movements of hominins over several millions of years. Yet, although we seem to have now framed the overall picture of our narrative, its details remain mostly blurred leaving many chapters unfinished and their events highly debated, particularly those related to the number and timing of the dispersal events, the specific hominin taxa involved in each, and the effects of factors like technology, climate, and interactions among hominin populations, in shaping these events. As the bridge that connects Africa to the rest of the world, the Levant is an ideal place to look for answers. At its heart is Lebanon, a small country exceptionally rich in Paleolithic archaeological material reminiscent of a dense hominin occupation spanning the entirety of this period. Yet, Lebanon’s rich Paleolithic record remains undiscovered and its potential is mostly forgotten since Paleolithic archaeological exploration in the country was forcefully stopped in its early infancy by the outbreak of the civil war (1975). REVIVE, a highly ambitious, groundbreaking project, will form the first ever large-scale and systematic archaeological/paleoanthropological project to be conducted on Lebanon’s Paleolithic. It will, finally after 45 years, revive Paleolithic research in the country and use its wealthy record to start filling in the gaps in our ancestors’ dispersals narrative.

Mots-clés : hominin dispersals,neandertals,early modern humans
Projet ERC : COGNITIVE THREADS (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Aarhus University — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : AU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1490515.0 €

Our understanding of the neural basis of human cognition and its relation to behaviour is limited by the extent to which we can observe its underlying components. Neural activity elicited by a given stimulus can be decomposed in parallel threads of cognitive computation, each specialising on a different aspect of the stimulus. Conventional methods are fundamentally limited to tease apart these components within the stimulus-specific brain activity, therefore obscuring our understanding of the underlying mechanisms. I will build a framework to distil these threads by modelling their (trial-by-trial) distinct spatiotemporal trajectories and the interaction between them. Furthermore, I propose that the way our brains process stimuli, and in particular how these different components organise and relate to each other, can be critical to characterise subjects at the psychological and clinical level. However, it is unclear how to relate these complex models of stimulus processing to the subject phenotypes. I will develop principled algorithms to automatically discover which specific aspects of the modelled brain activity are most relevant to the traits under study. In summary, this multidisciplinary project brings together modelling and prediction across different data modalities to offer a novel temporal analytic account of how different threads of brain activity give rise to cognition, and how the nature of these elements relates to population variability. I will tackle three important questions that are representative of the addressed methodological challenges: in the study of decision-making, the relation between value representation, decision-formation and attention; in sleep research, which specific aspects of the sleep cycle are most altered in insomniacs; in the field of pain perception, the disambiguation of nociception and salience, and how these diverge in chronic pain. Despite diverse, these questions are conceptually linked by ideas presented here.
Projet ERC : NPTEV-TQP2020 (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Rome Tor Vergata — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1581831.12 €

Our understanding of the subatomic world and of the very fabric of the space-time is encompassed in a theory which is the result of all past experimental observations and theoretical developments: the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Yet cosmological observations and theoretical arguments lead us to conclude that new phenomenology, new particles, forces, or a new space-time structure is waiting to be uncovered. Naturalness of the recently discovered Higgs boson suggests that new phenomena should appear at the tera-electronvolt (TeV) scale, and will be accompanied by modifications to the dynamics of the heaviest elementary particle known: the top quark. The aim of this proposal is to perform five measurements involving top quarks with the data that will be collected by the ATLAS experiment at the upcoming Run II (2015-18) of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): the top quark mass, the CP violation in B hadron decays from the top, the top-Z boson couplings, the search for the top's Flavour Changing Neutral decays, and the search for heavy resonances decaying to top pairs. While measuring these properties is nothing new, the measurements are performed coherently using novel techniques beyond state-of-the-art to push the boundaries on the sensitivity of the limited Run II data, hence allowing the discovery of new phenomena at the LHC before 2020.

Mots-clés : atlas,top physics
Projet ERC : NPTEV-TQP2020 (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : U. London
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 161855.27 €

Our understanding of the subatomic world and of the very fabric of the space-time is encompassed in a theory which is the result of all past experimental observations and theoretical developments: the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Yet cosmological observations and theoretical arguments lead us to conclude that new phenomenology, new particles, forces, or a new space-time structure is waiting to be uncovered. Naturalness of the recently discovered Higgs boson suggests that new phenomena should appear at the tera-electronvolt (TeV) scale, and will be accompanied by modifications to the dynamics of the heaviest elementary particle known: the top quark. The aim of this proposal is to perform five measurements involving top quarks with the data that will be collected by the ATLAS experiment at the upcoming Run II (2015-18) of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): the top quark mass, the CP violation in B hadron decays from the top, the top-Z boson couplings, the search for the top's Flavour Changing Neutral decays, and the search for heavy resonances decaying to top pairs. While measuring these properties is nothing new, the measurements are performed coherently using novel techniques beyond state-of-the-art to push the boundaries on the sensitivity of the limited Run II data, hence allowing the discovery of new phenomena at the LHC before 2020.

Mots-clés : atlas,top physics
Projet ERC : MENTICA (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Reading — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499351.0 €

Our world is marked by ‘disruption’, major re-orderings of society through changing circumstances, including abrupt climate change, impacting on social and economic life. What lessons can we learn from the prehistoric past about disruption, and human engagement with it? One of the first global disruptions faced by human societies was the Neolithic transition from mobile forager-hunter to settled farmer-herder in the Epi-Palaeolithic and Early Neolithic periods of the Middle East, 17,000-7000 BCE. Human communities worked through this disruption, including climate change, to enable complex societies to thrive and to form the basis for later cities, empires and civilisations. In this project, I will address key ‘Grand Challenges’ for archaeology including human responses to climate change, and societal transformation and resilience. I will lead an inter-disciplinary team in investigating the Early Neolithic transition in a greatly under-researched region, the eastern Fertile Crescent of western Iran and eastern Iraq, a core zone for early developments, including domestication of animals and crops such as goat and barley. From this zone, early farmers disseminated herding and cultivation practices across Iran into Central and South Asia and Transcaucasia. But as yet we know little about the early stages in the development of farming life-ways in the eastern Fertile Crescent, because this upland area of the Zagros mountains in Iran and Iraq has been challenging for research teams to work in. As the only scholar directing research in both western Iran and eastern Iraq, I am in a unique position to lead this high-risk, trans-border project, on a major ancient route-way (later the Silk Road) from the highlands of Iran to the plains of Mesopotamia. I will direct a programme of six integrated Work Packages examining climate, plants and animals, built environment, food-ways, death and burial, and craft, within a theoretical framework of community networks and identities.

Mots-clés : neolithic middle east,early agriculture,sedentism,community and identity
Projet ERC : CrackEpitranscriptom (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems
Entité participante : Weizmann Institute of Science — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1402666.0 €

Over 100 types of distinct modifications are catalyzed on RNA molecules post-transcriptionally. In an analogous manner to well-studied chemical modifications on proteins or DNA, modifications on RNA - and particularly on mRNA - harbor the exciting potential of regulating the complex and interlinked life cycle of these molecules. The most abundant modification in mammalian and yeast mRNA is N6-methyladenosine (m6A). We have pioneered approaches for mapping m6A in a transcriptome wide manner, and we and others have identified factors involved in encoding and decoding m6A. While experimental disruption of these factors is associated with severe phenotypes, the role of m6A remains enigmatic. No single methylated site has been shown to causally underlie any physiological or molecular function. This proposal aims to establish a framework for systematically deciphering the molecular function of a modification and its underlying mechanisms and to uncover the physiological role of the modification in regulation of a cellular response. We will apply this framework to m6A in the context of meiosis in budding yeast, as m6A dynamically accumulates on meiotic mRNAs and as the methyltransferase catalyzing m6A is essential for meiosis. We will (1) aim to elucidate the physiological targets of methylation governing entry into meiosis (2) seek to elucidate the function of m6A at the molecular level, and understand its impact on the various steps of the mRNA life cycle, (3) seek to understand the mechanisms underlying its effects. These aims will provide a comprehensive framework for understanding how the epitranscriptome, an emerging post-transcriptional layer of regulation, fine-tunes gene regulation and impacts cellular decision making in a dynamic response, and will set the stage towards dissecting the roles of m6A and of an expanding set of mRNA modifications in more complex and disease related systems.

Mots-clés : rna biology,post transcriptional regulation of rna,rna binding proteins
Projet ERC : SiCMetabol (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : University of Würzburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1041946.04 €

Over 380 million people suffer from diabetes worldwide, with majority of cases being attributed to type 2 diabetes (T2D). Obesity is a major risk factor predisposing to the development of this disease. T2D is characterized by peripheral insulin resistance in combination with relative insulin deficiency that results in hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia. Liver and adipose tissue are central for regulation of glucose and lipids levels. However, during T2D the hepatic glucose uptake is reduced while rates of gluconeogenesis and lipogenesis are increased. In the adipose tissue, T2D leads to decreased glucose uptake, perturbations in secretion of adipokines and increased lipolysis. Importantly, dysfunction of the liver and the adipose tissue during T2D is caused by defective phosphorylation signaling cascades and normalization of these pathways was shown to attenuate the course of T2D. However, the specific roles of different classes of signaling molecules in these organs remain poorly characterized. We hypothesize that the cross-talk of different classes of signaling molecules determines regulation of metabolism. Thus, we aim to identify the signaling networks regulating metabolism. The results generated in my own laboratory suggest that the Pkd family kinases are the crucial regulators of metabolic homeostasis. Specifically, Pkd1 and Pkd2 promote obesity and diabetes while Pkd3 controls liver function. Thus, we plan to characterize the molecular mechanisms controlling Pkds signaling. In parallel, we will utilize screening approaches to identify novel, non-canonical signaling modules (phosphatases and components of the ubiquitin system) regulating abundance, localization and phosphorylation of targets of Pkds and, in the long term, also other kinases implicated in T2D. By identifying and characterizing the essential signaling networks in liver and adipose tissue the project will contribute to more targeted pharmacological strategies for the treatment of T2D.