Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : Sweet_Evo (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: B iological  Mechanisms , Structures  and Functions
Entité participante : Université hébraïque de Jérusalem — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HUJI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1639528.0 €

Approximately four billion years ago, chemical and geological processes on the ancient Earth caused a continuous increase in the complexity of organic molecules, ultimately leading to RNA, DNA, proteins, polysaccharides, membrane-forming amphipaths, to metabolism and the roots of biology. But how did it all begin? How did chemistry become biology? There are many indications to the starting point, i.e., the huge set of small molecules that existed on early Earth, as well as the end point of chemical evolution - which is the beginning of biology and the first living organisms. In order to unravel the gap of what happened in between, it is crucial to analyze plausible routes to the origin of life. While much effort to date in the context of formation of primordial polymers has focused on the generation of nucleic acids, and to a lesser extent the formation of peptides, the role of sugars in the chemical origins of life has never been investigated - outside the roles of sugars as structural elements of nucleic acids and in metabolism. Sugars are ubiquitous biomolecules, providing an energy source, taking part in biosynthesis, providing structural support, and even acting as catalysts. Sugars are often found in conjugation with other biomolecules (e.g., glycolipids). I hypothesize that the tightly intertwined biological dependencies of sugars and other biopolymers, and their mutualistic relationships, reflect a long co-evolutionary process. The main goal of this proposal is to bridge the gap from early prebiotic chemistry to today’s complex biochemistry by studying mutually catalytic networks involving sugars. Following our preliminary findings which successfully demonstrated the formation of oligomers composed of sugars and amino acids, my team will generate and characterize a multitude of heterogenous glycan-containing conjugates - and study their emergent assembly and function. This study will furnish a deep understanding of how and why life’s biochemistry emerged.

Mots-clés : origins of life,chemical evolution,prebiotic chemistry,peptide evolution,protopeptides,glycobiology,self assembly,peptide glycan interactions,co evolution
Projet ERC : PalaeOrigins (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Aranzadi zientzi elkartea — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : DE CIENCIAS ARANZADI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 28000.0 €

The transition from foraging to farming represents one of the most transcendental shifts in the history of humanity. Decades of research in southwest Asia have shown that this process culminated with the development of Neolithic agricultural systems c. 10 ka cal. BP. Yet, how it started, that is, how hunter-gatherers became, for the first time, engaged with the management of plants, continues to be largely undetermined. Palaeorigins aims to fill this major gap of knowledge. Benefiting from the exceptional Epipalaeolithic archaeobotanical materials that are now available (c. 23-11 ka cal. BP), it will ask: To what extent were Epipalaeolithic hunter-gatherers managing the land and the plant resources around them? Did climatic factors trigger plant resource intensification, or were cultural dynamics, like the need for specific foodstuffs, that first motivated plant-food production? To achieve such an ambitious aim PalaeOrigins will pioneer a holistic and high-resolution approach to study the plant-based subsistence. It will use a unique combination of traditional and most novel archaeobotanical materials, state-of-the-art stable isotope analyses, computational science, and theoretical models to: 1) Reconstruct the distribution and availability of plant resources during the environmental shifts of the late Pleistocene and the early Holocene; 2) Determine how plant procurement strategies, land uses and management activities articulated during the Epipalaeolithic period; and 3) Define hunter-gatherers' food culture, assessing their plant-food selection, processing and consumption practices. Taken together, PalaeOrigins will move beyond traditional Neolithic-centred paradigms to explain the origins of plant-food production. It will open up new research horizons, merging science and theory, to elucidate the nature of the human-environment interactions that paved the way to agriculture, and ultimately, changed the course of our history.

Mots-clés : epipalaeolithic,archaeobotany,human niche construction,plant domestication,climate change,archaeology of food,southwest asia,stable isotope analyses,computer modelling
Projet ERC : NEXUS (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Université de Trieste — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1262011.5 €

The dynamics of charges and atoms when electrons are excited to energy levels above the ground state underpins energy conversion in photosynthesis, photocatalysis and solar cell technologies. Modelling excited electronic states remains however a major challenge. While density functional theory (DFT) has been hugely successful in predicting ground state properties of systems with several atoms and electrons, excited state extensions based on time-dependent formulations often lack the required accuracy. I have pioneered alternative approaches where the excited state orbitals are variationally optimized by converging on saddle points on the electronic energy surface. Preliminary studies show that such time-INdependent methods have similar efficiency and predictive power as ground state DFT. The central idea of NEXUS is to develop an innovative computational framework leveraging saddle point search strategies to significantly expand excited state simulations beyond their current scope.  Meanwhile, modern ultrafast X-ray techniques can achieve structural sensitivity for organic chromophores, offering a means to validate and complement the theoretical models for this important class of photoactive systems. By simulating the excited states in condensed phase rather than gas phase and directly visualizing atomic motion via ultrafast X-rays, NEXUS will provide unprecedented insights into the electronic and structural dynamics of organic molecules with application in photoswitching, singlet fission, and artificial photosynthesis. The goal is to unravel the elusive interplay between structure and function and pave the way to the rational design of photofunctional systems, enhancing the efficiency of solar energy conversion. An effective, low cost approach for modelling excited states of large systems is ground breaking and will have impact well beyond organic molecules, enabling the study of charge and atom dynamics in photochemical reactions for a wide range of applications.
Projet ERC : FINALphagy (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and R egeneration
Entité participante : Hôpital de l'Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : OUH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 505105.0 €

When an organism experiences physiological stresses, such as nutrient starvation, it activates several mechanisms to promote its survival. One of these mechanisms is autophagy, which is a catabolic pathway conserved from yeast to man that functions as a recycling system during normal physiology, and which helps provide nutrients to sustain essential cellular processes during starvation. Although autophagy is an intensively studied process that plays a major role both in normal development and in a wide variety of diseases, several important aspects of autophagy remain to be elucidated. For instance, whereas the vast majority of studies have focused on how cells regulate the activation of autophagy, it remains largely unknown how cells and organisms shut off autophagy in response to returning nutrient availability. The limited knowledge of autophagy termination is partly due to a lack of available tools and appropriate methods. Addressing these challenges will not only provide important insight in this fundamental aspect of the autophagic process, but may potentially also identify new targets for development of drugs to manipulate this phase of autophagy. In FINALphagy I will develop new genetic and computational tools to quantify and manipulate the temporal dynamics of autophagy in an entire organism. I will unravel key mechanism of autophagy termination in individual cells within a tissue and dissect how this connects to systemic signaling and behavioral changes. This will generate a comprehensive toolbox for time- and space-resolved manipulation and quantification of autophagy levels, produce a whole-organism map of autophagy responses at the tissue-level, and conceptualize our understanding of the dynamics of autophagy regulation in an entire organism during changing nutrient levels.

Mots-clés : autophagy,drosophila,in vivo imaging,machine learning,metabolism,systemic signaling,mathematical modeling
Projet ERC : REVERT (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and R egeneration
Entité participante : Hôpital universitaire de la Charité de Berlin — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Charité
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1426714.0 €

Tissues with high turnover are hierarchically organized and rely on long-lived stem cells that are protected by a variety of mechanisms. In the gastrointestinal tract, highly active stem cells are located in the base of crypts, where differentiated cells shield them from environmental threats. It has recently emerged that mucosal injuries initiate regenerative repair programs that promote a disruption of cellular hierarchies and reversal of differentiated cells back to the proliferative stem cell state. While this remarkable plasticity enables rapid injury repair, I propose that the recruitment of differentiated cells to the stem cell pool represents a critical event for the accumulation of genetic and epigenetic alterations because differentiated cells are more exposed to the environment and less equipped to repair DNA damage. Particularly in the colon with its dense and potentially harmful microbiota, injury-driven de-differentiation may be linked to loss of cell functions that control the microbiota and direct exposure of “de novo stem cells” to bacteria and their genotoxic virulence factors. REVERT will investigate the long-term consequences of such transient interactions on molecular, cellular, and tissue levels and explore the impact of the regenerative state on mucosal microbial ecology and function. REVERT will combine stem cell biology approaches such as, lineage tracing, organoids, and assembloids with microbiology techniques such as gnotobiotic infection models, and integrate complex systems biology technologies to build up a picture of dynamic tissue responses to injuries and the ability of microbes to interfere with them. REVERT has the potential to establish fundamental new knowledge of principles that govern mucosal integrity and reveal its vulnerabilities in the context of injury. It has the potential to drastically expand our understanding of processes that drive chronic tissue dysfunction and carcinogenesis.

Mots-clés : microbiota,regeneration,colon stem cells,injury repair,innate memory,carcinogenesis
Projet ERC : DECAF (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499435.0 €

Transition-metal catalyzed cross-coupling reactions have transformed carbon-carbon bond formation in complex organic molecules, revolutionizing fields like pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries, polymers, and natural product synthesis. Despite their vast applications, these reactions heavily rely on toxic organic halides and organometallic reagents that require multiple preparation steps and often lack stability. Carboxylic esters (RCOOE) offer a promising alternative as they are readily available, potentially bio-sourced, and can serve as bifunctional partners in cross-coupling reactions. The ester’s R and E groups can act as nucleophiles and electrophiles upon carbon dioxide extrusion, forming carbon-carbon bonds (R–E) by recombination in an exergonic transformation. However, unlocking the full potential of esters faces a significant kinetic challenge due to the difficult activation of strong C–O bonds. This challenge has limited applications to reactive substrates like allyl esters (E = allyl). The DECAF project seeks to overcome these barriers by developing groundbreaking multi-catalyst cross-coupling reactions using dialkyl carboxylic esters (RCOOE with R, E = alkyl) as versatile and bifunctional reagents under visible-light irradiation. In the first Strand, DECAF will focus on generating reactive intermediates from the cleavage of ester C–O bonds. Their potential as cross-coupling partners will be demonstrated through the example of Heck-type couplings with alkenes. The second Strand will introduce an electron-borrowing strategy to enable the decarboxylative recombination of esters. This unified mechanistic approach will extend the application of carboxylic esters as bifunctional reagents to catalytic alkene transfer dialkylations and, ultimately, decarboxylative sulfonylations.
Projet ERC : INFOPASS (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Nederlandse organisatie voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NWO
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1686875.0 €

Smart devices constantly monitor the environment and analyse the resulting stream of information, waiting for wake-up events ranging from a skipped heartbeat in a pacemaker to a verbal command in an intelligent speaker. In electronic devices, such constant workload requires reliable power and leads to significant battery drainage. The aim of INFOPASS is to answer the need for zero standby power, always-on sensing and processing, by inventing novel components based on architected elastic microstructures. We will focus on passive speech recognition: Vibrating structures that respond with large amplitudes only when excited by a particular spoken word. The components will be based on artificial neural networks of mechanical resonators -- benefiting from their ultra-low power dissipation and bypassing the inefficient transduction between acoustic and electric signals. The goal of passive speech recognition is challenging due to the required device complexity. Conventional micromechanical systems consist of a few resonators, while neural networks require thousands of nodes, pushing the limits of design and fabrication technologies by orders of magnitude. The proposed work builds on my invention of a two-step structure design method: Advanced responses are engineered by first encoding the desired response in an effective mass-spring model, which is then translated into a structural geometry. Compared to full-wave simulations, mass-spring models speed-up the optimisation process by more than a thousand-fold, allowing us to 'train' the structures on realistic speech corpuses. The invention of devices that passively perform complex information processing tasks will lead to mobile devices with longer battery life, always-on Internet-Of-Things devices that consume no standby power, and battery-less health monitoring sensors ? potentially impacting billions of devices.

Mots-clés : physical computing,artificial neural networks,intelligent systems,solid mechanics,structural dynamics,nonlinear dynamics,metamaterials
Projet ERC : ASC-Q (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Nederlandse organisatie voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NWO
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499798.75 €

As progress is made in implementing quantum computers, the question is looming: What will we do with them? This proposal is concerned with the theoretical computer science aspects of this question. Part of this question is concerned with quantum algorithms (WP1). We know of several examples of quantum algorithms with large speedups over the best known classical algorithms, such as Shor's poly-time integer factorization algorithm. While this is evidence that quantum computers will be useful once built, it does not tell us what quantum computers will be used for in practice (probably not much factoring). To ensure that quantum computer users are best able to make use of them, we will focus on developing general techniques for the design of quantum algorithms that can be easily applied by subject-matter experts in different fields to the problems that interest them.  We will also consider the constraints of early quantum computers in our algorithm design. First, we would like to understand how the limited memory of early quantum computers will impact what they can do. Some of the most important techniques for designing quantum algorithms are already well-suited to the study of space-bounded computation, and we will generalize and improve these in WP1. To complement this, we will study lower bounds and complexity (WP2), focusing on space-bounded complexity classes, which have many relationships with other complexity classes. Second, since most early users will have to delegate their quantum computations, we would like to understand which quantum algorithms can still be used in various delegated or multiparty settings where some type of security is a consideration. We take the novel approach of using a quantum algorithmic model called span programs to design secure quantum computing protocols (WP3). It turns out that space-bounded models and secure quantum computation are very much related, and understanding this relationship is what ties this proposal together.

Mots-clés : quantum algorithms,quantum walks,span programs,quantum complexity theory,space bounded quantum computing,secure quantum computing
Projet ERC : IceAblation (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : École normale supérieure de Lyon — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : ENS de Lyon
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 70986.0 €

Ice shelves fringing the Antarctic coastline limit sea-level rise by slowing down the flow of grounded ice into the sea. They are thinning because of warming and intensifying ocean currents. Building upon my expertise in multi-scale flow dynamics and subglacial oceanography, I will resolve the two main bottlenecks that impair our ability to assess and project the state of Antarctic ice shelves. These are: (i) a poor understanding of the relationship between ice-shelf ablation rates and ocean properties & (ii) the high computational cost of ocean simulations.  I will first build new models of the metre-thick ice-shelf—ocean boundary layer (ISOBL), using innovative laboratory experiments and simulations that will unravel its dynamics. The lack of accurate ISOBL models is responsible for leading-order errors in predicting ice loss rates and freshwater production. The new models will capture how turbulence controls heat fluxes over an unprecedented range of sub ice-shelf conditions, accurately predicting ice ablation rates from the grounding line to the shelf front.  I will then promote a paradigm shift in the modelling of oceans beneath ice shelves, which are hundreds of kilometres wide. At present, ensemble simulations of ice-shelf ocean cavities on 100-year time scales are about 1000 times computationally too costly to resolve mesoscales, which influence the mean circulation and ice ablation. To circumvent this issue, I will train novel data-driven reduced-order models (ROMs), which will emulate the ocean dynamics at high resolution and unprecedently low computational cost. The ROMs will learn the key fingerprints of ocean cavities and their time evolution from short-term high-resolution simulations. They will then be extended to longer times and different forcing conditions, enabling eddy-resolving IPCC-level large ensemble simulations of subglacial oceans, which will help reduce uncertainty related to the timing of abrupt regime changes of the Antarctic ice sheet.

Mots-clés : subglacial oceanography,turbulence,ice shelves,boundary layers,large scale flows,mesoscales,melting and dissolution,direct numerical simulations,laboratory experiments,data driven reduced order models,subgrid scale parameterization,ice sheets,sea level rise,climate change
Projet ERC : METABALANCANCER (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Consortium for genomic technologiessocieta benefit srl — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : COGENTECH SOCIETA BENEFIT SRL
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 169155.0 €

The goal of this proposal is to explore combinations of targeted metabolite supplementation and global nutrient restriction as a new strategy to reprogram tumor metabolism, to halt tumor progression and to improve response to treatments. Preclinical and clinical studies published by our group and by others showed that global nutrient restriction, in the form of cyclic fasting or fasting-mimicking diets (FMDs), produces desirable metabolic and immunologic effects that result in reduced tumor progression and in the prolongation of animal/patient survival. Of note, our unpublished results indicate that the supplementation of specific amino acids or fatty acids has in vitro and in vivo antitumor effects, which are strongly enhanced when metabolite supplementation is combined with nutrient starvation. By employing canonical cell biology and biochemical experiments, polysome/ribosome profiling, isotope tracing experiments and integrated omics (transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic) analyses in in vitro and in vivo murine and human tumor models, here we propose to: - identify the cell-autonomous and immune-mediated mechanisms at the basis of the antitumor effects of targeted metabolite supplementation in combination with global nutrient restriction; - identify the most effective metabolite supplementation-restriction strategy to be tested in a first-in-human clinical trial in patients with advanced triple-negative breast cancer. While the basic cancer research and medical oncology communities are engaged in a historical scientific and clinical diatribe on the use of nutrient deprivation vs. supplementation approaches to halt tumor progression and to improve patient survival, we will exploit our unprecedented ability to conduct parallel preclinical and clinical experimentation in the field of cancer metabolism to identify new and effective combinations of balanced metabolite supplementation and restriction, with relevant scientific and translational implications.

Mots-clés : in vitro models in vivo models anticancer immunity multi omics bioinfomatics