Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : MaDCap (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

From their creation to their degradation, mRNAs are under extensive regulation. This regulation is directed not only by their nucleotide sequence and their promoter but also by post- and co-transcriptional modifications attached to the RNA. One of the most ubiquitous of these modifications in eukaryotes is the 5' cap — typically a methylated guanine (m7G) attached inversely to the first transcribed nucleotide. Several decades of research have revealed the m7G cap as an interface for regulating stability, splicing, polyadenylation, localization, and translation. The m7G cap was long presumed to be the only functional cap in eukaryotes, but this view was recently overturned by the discovery of the non-canonical nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) cap. Following this, several other eukaryotic cap structures were discovered: NADH, flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD), uridine diphosphate glucose (UDP-Glc), and uridine diphosphate N-acetylglucosamine (UDP-GlcNAc). The function of most non-canonical caps is unknown, but their presence suggests the existence of a regulatory “cap code”.  Currently, the complete cap structure can only be identified through bulk methods that cleave caps from their transcripts, thereby losing the link between mRNAs and their specific caps. For NAD-caps enrichment techniques exist that can be followed by sequencing, but no such method exists for other non-canonical caps, and no sequencing method exists that can identify more than one cap. This limitation is a significant obstacle in understanding the cap code and the function of its more enigmatic members.  The objective of this project is to 1) develop a novel single-molecule method that can directly sequence native caps with their full-length RNA transcripts, 2) use this method to characterize the cap-ome across tissues and development, and 3) use the resulting temporal and spatial atlas of capped RNAs to determine the function of non-canonical caps and understand the non-canonical cap code

Mots-clés : mrna capping,nanopore sequencing
Projet ERC : EPIC (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1963575.0 €

The Ediacaran-early Cambrian (~635-520 Ma) was an interval of immense global change with fundamental state shifts occurring in the bio-cryo- and atmosphere. Such changes included the abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of modern metazoan life (the Ediacaran fauna and Cambrian ‘explosion’), the end of protracted, global-scale glaciations (Snowball Earth), the rise of atmospheric oxygen to present-day levels, and the perturbation of carbon isotopic records to extremes otherwise unknown to Earth history. Given the immensity and abruptness of those changes, they are clearly essential to an understanding of the development of life, the history of climatic change and the evolution of the oxygen and carbon cycles. Accordingly, great effort has been dedicated to acquiring detailed temporal records to investigate those changes through time, but we still lack a robust paleogeographic framework to study them in space. This is because paleomagnetic data—which are used to determine the ancient positions of continents—exhibit aberrant behaviour at this time, the meaning of which is unknown. Four alternative hypotheses have been formulated to explain them: 1) rapid rotations of the entire solid Earth (true polar wander), 2) an unstable magnetic field, 3) pervasive data corruption, or 4) ultra-fast plate motion. Each of these hypotheses has far-reaching implications: Hypotheses 1, 2 & 4 reflect dramatic non-uniformitarian processes that would defy our understanding of geodynamics, whereas hypothesis 3 poses grave challenges to the interpretation of paleomagnetic data in Precambrian time. My vision with EPIC is to investigate and identify the origin(s) of the aberrant paleomagnetic data of this age, and to use that knowledge to directly reconstruct Ediacaran-early Cambrian paleogeography for the first time. EPIC will thus transform one of geophysics’ most outstanding enigmas into one of our greatest assets in understanding this critical time in Earth’s development.

Mots-clés : paleomagnetism paleogeography geodynamics tectonics
Projet ERC : TWIST (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999116.0 €

The transport of drops on slender structures, such as threads and fibers, plays an essential role in engineering applications and is pivotal for the survival of many living creatures. The key to these processes lies in efficiently transporting drops and controlling their motion along the fiber. Drop flow control is enabled by manipulating the fiber’s surface properties, where today’s surface manufacturing methods hinge on advanced and costly techniques, including environmentally harmful chemicals. In the TWIST project, I will develop a new methodology for designing optimal drop transport on twisted fibers and nets. By mechanically twisting multiple fibers with different sizes, geometries, poro-elasticity, and physicochemical properties, I will create, through simple means and without the need for advanced microsystem technology, a hierarchical and grooved structure that can be tuned to control the flow of drops. The TWIST project aims to elucidate the fundamental fluid mechanics of drop capillary flows on these fibrous structures, even when exposed to wind and vibrations, and to provide new theoretical tools for describing the underlying fluid physics. Furthermore, the project will facilitate the development of pathways for utilizing sustainable materials, such as animal and plant-based materials, to generate twisted fiber structures with desired properties and utilize their hygroscopic responses. To showcase its potential use in applications, these fiber structures will be implemented in the fog net technology, which is used to capture atmospheric fog in arid regions. It is envisioned that TWIST will enable new research and engineering a pathways for a Do-It-Yourself solution to produce sustainable threads and nets, going beyond plastic based solutions. If successful, it offers a low-cost sustainable solution relying only on abundant materials found worldwide and can be developed without the need for advanced machining, and as such made by anyone, anywhere.

Mots-clés : capillary flows drops on fibers contact lines wetting
Projet ERC : FatVersusBile (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1488680.0 €

The obesity epidemic has caused a surge of metabolic-dysfunction associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), an important cause of morbidity and mortality. This also leads to other liver diseases presenting with steatotic (fatty) liver as a “second hit”, with unpredictable impact on clinical outcome. In the present project, I will use the co-existence of two different liver diseases to study how the gut microbiome interacts with steatosis and autoimmunity. Both MASLD and primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), an autoimmune disease of the bile ducts, are more common in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) than in the population, suggesting they are driven by gut microbial activity (gut signals). However, MASLD and PSC co-exist less frequently than expected, appearing to protect against each other. Separate gut signals could therefore influence these conditions, and a driver of one disease could even protect against the other. Studies of PSC-MASLD-IBD provide a unique window to define how gut signals interact to cause and drive liver health, which would be of great importance in MASLD and PSC, where few effective therapies are available.  I have in the ongoing ERC Starting Grant StopAutoimmunity shown that PSC is associated with large changes in microbial functions, motivating the novel hypothesis that distinct gut-derived signals drive autoimmunity of the bile ducts and steatotic liver disease. I will use an extensive set of methods established in my group to define the gut signals acting in PSC and MASLD and liver health. I have available unique cohorts and materials from these conditions, and experimental models based on human microbiome. The expected outcomes include the first detailed description of this clinical problem and the identification of distinct gut signals driving and protecting against steatosis and biliary autoimmunity, serving as basis for diagnostic and prognostic tools, and new targets relevant for trials to prevent and treat liver disease.
Projet ERC : SpectrO (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2323358.5 €

Opioids are irreplaceable and effective analgesics– at the group level. However, clinicians still cannot predict how much pain relief each patient will achieve, nor who will develop addiction. By treating the variability of opioid effects as noise, the group-based efficacy studies fail to explain why opioids relieve pain in some people, but not in others. Here, I will turn the current approach on its head. By harnessing the valuable information inherent in opioids’ variable and diverse effects, I aim to achieve a breakthrough in our ability to predict individual patient responses to opioids and enable effective personalised pain treatment. SpectrO has three main objectives:  1) First, I will employ large-scale data to generate robust and reproducible evidence on the full spectrum of opioid effects and resolve key controversies in the opioid literature (WP1: comprehensive samples).  Next, I will hone in on each extreme of the opioid effects spectrum to:  2) Answer why opioid effects are so variable and diverse. A newly discovered human genetic knockout model affords unprecedented insights into human endogenous opioid function, far beyond the current state-of-the-art (WP2: opioid-insensitive sample).  3) Produce randomised controlled evidence at the individual level through a N-of-1 case series with double-blind dose titration for individual dose efficacy determination. WP3 represents a leap forward in opioid research, promising to close the gap between the group-based trials (which show no benefit of long-term opioids) and the clinical experience that some patients do benefit (opioid-sensitive sample).  My unique track record in leading large interdisciplinary opioid trials and conducting innovative literature syntheses lends feasibility to this ambitious project. SpectrO will set a new direction for opioid research, offering powerful new resources and methods to resolve key mechanistic questions and urgent public health issues on pain and addiction.

Mots-clés : pain,reward,addiction,experience,mood,affect,well being
Projet ERC : BEYONDREST (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Forum transregionale studien ev — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Autres
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

On the backdrop of ongoing debates to decolonialize museums, BEYONDREST asks if the return of looted art can be regarded as a closure of historical wounds. The project probes the focus on restitution that inadvertently casts dispossessed art in terms of contested property. Instead, BEYONDREST explores what kind of loss dispossessed art engenders, and how this loss has shaped the knowledge production on heritage. It focuses on the interlocution between Western Europe, the Near and Middle East, and North Africa, mapping relationships between people and “things” that have largely been left out of current debates. The project starts in the mid-19th century, which witnessed the rise of the museum in its modern form as well as violence unleashed by imperial and colonial projects and dispossession. Innumerable objects made their way into international collections, categorized mostly as “Islamic art,” or as the “universal heritage of humankind” that nonetheless symbolically and proprietarily belongs to the “West.” BEYONDREST tackles dispossession not as a loss to be mended but a means to transform knowledge through inquiries into absence. The interdisciplinary research group will employ a wide methodologically matrix, including ethnographic interviews, visual analysis of exhibitions, archival research, and textual analysis of the laws governing cultural assets to capture the proprietary stakes in the interplay of epistemic remembering and forgetting. BEYONDREST takes risks by centering on what is absent, rather than present, on what is lost, rather than found. It argues that the dispossession of art is not merely a problematic of colonialism or empire, that is of the past, but an ongoing process that is constitutive for the governance of heritage in its national and transnational formations. BEYONDREST’s working hypothesis is that the dispossession of art and cultural heritage is not an aberration, but a precondition for the ways in which art and cultural assets circulate.

Mots-clés : art,cultural heritage,dispossession,memory and forgetting,absence production of knowledge,cultural heritage and the law
Projet ERC : GeoTrAnsQData (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université d'Utrecht — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999500.0 €

Geographic information systems (GIS) and corresponding data sources are of major importance for answering the questions posed by data scientists from various domains of application. The recent trend of adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based methods in Geography and Geoscience has spurred hopes that geographic information can be successfully reused across disciplines without requiring the technical skills of GIS. In this context, geographic question-answering (GeoQA) methods are particularly promising because they enable users without a technical background to answer their questions about geographic space using natural language. However, most geographic questions data scientists may want to answer require some form of geo-analytical transformation of maps. Answer maps need to be (re)generated from data, rather than retrieved from storage. In contrast, stored maps are frequently lacking, outdated, biased, or of insufficient quality. For example, instead of retrieving statistical facts about noise intensity in a city, we might want to know about the coverage of noisy areas in this city. Yet, while the latter map might not be readily available, it could be generated from available sources. State-of-the-art factoid-based GeoQA methods are insufficient for this purpose because they directly match questions to facts, skipping over the problem of how unknown answers may be generated from these sources. In this project, we will develop an entirely novel paradigm for data-based question-answering, called transformative GeoQA, including a theory of geo-analytical transformations. The latter not only allows us to interpret questions in terms of the procedures for answering them but also to describe geodata as a source or purpose of a transformation. In GeoTrAnsQData, we lay the methodical and theoretical foundations for a groundbreaking data ecosystem that enables the quantification of geographic phenomena by generating maps using natural language.

Mots-clés : geographic question answering geoai geodata repositories geo analytical transformations gis workflows core concepts
Projet ERC : HumanIgE (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and I mmunotherapy
Entité participante : Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inserm
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999431.0 €

IgE is a key driver of allergic diseases, which affect approximately one-third of the world’s population. Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) targeting IgE are approved for the treatment of allergic asthma, and show clinical benefit in a number of other allergic diseases. Yet, a sizable portion of patients do not respond to the drug despite high levels of IgE. There is a clear need to better define which allergy features depend (or not) on IgE, and to find predictive biomarkers in order to identify patients who will benefit from anti-IgE therapy. In addition, use of anti-IgE mAbs is limited by very high cost and the need to perform frequent reinfusion to maintain clinical efficiency. Combining unique mouse models humanized for IgE and its two receptors FceRI and CD23, clinical samples from patients undergoing FDA-approved anti-IgE therapy, and a novel high-throughput IgE repertoire analysis method, the project addresses three key questions: (1) Which IgE features distinguish responders vs. non-responders to anti-IgE therapy, and can it be used as predictive biomarker? (2) Which key allergy features depend on IgE, and through which mechanisms? (3) Can we induce long-term protection against IgE-mediated allergies with a vaccine approach? This translational project will increase our understanding of the basic mechanisms underlying allergic diseases, and has the potential to identify important new therapeutic strategies.

Mots-clés : ige,allergy,asthma,mast cell,antibody
Projet ERC : MEGACHEM (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université de Rostock — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998106.0 €

Pressures above 1 Mbar, equivalent to energy densities stored in chemical bonds, are predicted to severely reshape the periodic table of the elements as we know it. Such extreme conditions can radically alter the electronic structure and chemical properties of materials, especially when heating these to temperatures of several thousand kelvins, which suggests new approaches for the synthesis of so-far unknown material structures and compounds. However, due to a lack of predictive modelling and experimental challenges, exploration and exploitation of new chemistry above one megabar has remained a dark spot in our understanding of matter. Unprecedented experimental capabilities provided by large-scale laser facilities and X-ray free electron lasers, also supported by new theoretical and computational tools, now drastically change this situation and I am at the forefront of these revolutionary developments. With MEGACHEM, I will establish the research direction of dynamic megabar chemistry, motivated by my pioneering studies on light elements mixtures. Performing exploratory experiments in close interplay with theory, I will investigate novel routes to two interlinked “holy grail” cases: a) the synthesis of the long sought but still speculative BC-8 structure of carbon and b) a new approach to an efficient formation of ultrasmall nanodiamonds of tailored size and dopant level. Indeed, for reaching both goals, the pressure-driven insulator-metal transition of liquid hydrogen may play a central role. By investigating these cases, MEGACHEM will cover new ground and test state-of-the-art theoretical models by combining studies at my university labs with experiments at large-scale research infrastructures: hard X-ray free electron lasers such as the European XFEL, and the largest optical laser systems, such as the National Ignition Facility and the Extreme Light Infrastructure. By doing so, MEGACHEM can impact various areas, ranging from astrophysics to photocatalysis.

Mots-clés : high pressure,high temperature,shock compression,x ray free electron lasers,high energy lasers,carbon phase diagram,nanodiamonds
Projet ERC : B-yond (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Université de Namur — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1957875.0 €

The activation of chemical bonds is fundamental to every chemical transformation. While reactions mediated by transition-metal catalysts are known for more than a century, the last decade witnessed spectacular developments in the emerging area of catalysis mediated by non-metallic species. Among these new chemical entities made from earth-abundant and inexpensive main-group elements, Lewis acid-base pairs and bifunctional element/ligand systems mimicking the behavior of transition-metals rapidly revolutionized the activation modes of chemical bonds. In the project B-yond, I will establish new molecular engineering strategies and develop unprecedented main-group catalysts embedded in cage-shaped and curved molecular scaffolds. Ground-breaking molecules escaping the established structural theories will become the initial focus of my project, including the creation of non-planar B, Al, C and Si centered Lewis superacids with unmatched reactivities. I will push the frontiers of knowledge of chemical bonding by exploring unusual boron-elements bonding situations and advance the design of main-group catalysts beyond the state-of-the-art. Unprecedented C-H bond functionalization processes will be developed and exploited for hydrocarbons transformation through the concept of “low reorganization energy catalysts”. The activation of dinitrogen with unique main-group superacids and bases will finally be tackled, a pioneering step toward the uncharted territory of catalytic N2 activation and conversion without transition-metal complexes.  These goals will be accomplished through a multidisciplinary approach built on my expertise in mechanistic investigations, spectroscopic and kinetics methods, organometallic and main group chemistry. The project B-yond will deliver extraordinary solutions for chemists to reach new chemical reactivities beyond the actual limits and will inspire scientists to develop innovative sustainable and cost-effective chemical processes.

Mots-clés : organoboron chemistry,main group chemistry,frustrated lewis pairs,lewis acids and superacids