Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CASCAT (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : Ruhr University Bochum — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : RUB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499462.0 €

Nanoparticles with etched substrate channels are proposed as a simplified enzyme mimic, nanozymes, for electrocatalysis providing concave catalytically active sites together with the local modulation of electrolyte composition. This concept will be extended to bimetallic core-shell structures with etched channels to provide locally confined catalyst surfaces with varying selectivity. The first catalytic reaction at the channel entrance selectively generates a product, which is further converted in a follow-up reaction catalysed at the core material at the bottom of the channel. The endeavour to locally assemble catalysts with different properties in nano-confined reaction volumes to actualise cascade reaction pathways will be extended to layered nanoparticle structures. Together with an anisotropic provision of a gaseous reactant through a hydrophobic/hydrophilic phase boundary of specifically designed gas diffusion electrodes multi-step catalytic cascade reactions become feasible. The development and extensive evaluation of multi-catalyst gas-diffusion electrodes using operando electrochemistry/spectroscopy and nano-electrochemical tools as well as multi flow-through electrolysers will provide the fundamental knowledge concerning the relative location of different catalyst particles, which synergistically perform chemical cascade reaction with high selectivity and at high current densities. These gas-diffusion electrodes will be integrated in novel electrolyser concepts targeting CO2 recycling at high current density in alkaline solution under suppression of H2 competition with previously unprecedented selectivity for the formation of higher hydrocarbons envisioning contributions to a closed carbon cycle economy and a substantial decrease of CO2 emission. Additionally, a novel tree-type rotating electrolyser design is proposed for the removal of hazardous gaseous pollutants from air e.g. at street crossings in cities as exemplified by NOx reduction to N2 or NH3.

Mots-clés : electrocatalysis,nanoelectrochemistry,nanoparticles,etched nanoparticles,enzyme analogues,selectivity,substrate channel,gas diffusion electrodes,co2 reduction,nox reduction
Projet ERC : DeE-Nano (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems Engineering
Entité participante : University of Groningen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : RUG
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999970.0 €

Nanopores have emerged in the past few years as a promising analytical technique. The basic concept of nanopore sensing is to apply a potential across individual nanoscale pores and observe the disruption of the ionic flow caused by single molecules entering the pore. Ionic currents through protein pores have been successful at recognizing tiny differences in molecules in solution. Most notably, arrays of thousands of nanopores integrated in low-cost and portable devices are now capable of sequencing DNA at the single-molecule level. The main challenge of nanopore sensing is the inability of controlling the protein pore diameter and geometry, which determines the signal and enables selectivity based on physical size. The aim of this proposal is to design a new generation of protein nanopores that will take on the next grand challenge in nanopore sensing, that is the sequence identification of single proteins. In order to sequence proteins, the designed nanopores must: unfold a target protein, control the speed of its transit across the nanopore and recognize individual amino acids. Our approach is to design a transmembrane molecular machine that will unfold target proteins and feed the linearize polypeptide through the nanopore where single amino acids will be recognized by modulations of the nanopore current. The specific objectives are: i) Develop chemical and biotechnological methods to design synthetic protein-based pores ii) To precisely attach the unfolding machine to a nanopore iii) To genetically engineer the nanopore for optimal amino acid recognition Our nanopore devices will be used to develop the first technology to sequence single proteins. Compared to the state of the art ‘shotgun proteomics’, the nanopore approach will allow long polypeptide reads, recognition of low-abundance proteins, including biomarkers linked to diseases, and real-time monitoring with minimal cost, time and sample preparation.
Projet ERC : ACrossWire (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : University of Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. Cambridge
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499195.0 €

Nanowires based on group III–nitride semiconductors exhibit outstanding potential for emerging applications in energy-efficient lighting, optoelectronics and solar energy harvesting. Nitride nanowires, tailored at the nanoscale, should overcome many of the challenges facing conventional planar nitride materials, and also add extraordinary new functionality to these materials. However, progress towards III–nitride nanowire devices has been hampered by the challenges in quantifying nanowire electrical properties using conventional contact-based measurements. Without reliable electrical transport data, it is extremely difficult to optimise nanowire growth and device design. This project aims to overcome this problem through an unconventional approach: advanced contact-free electrical measurements. Contact-free measurements, growth studies, and device studies will be cross-correlated to provide unprecedented insight into the growth mechanisms that govern nanowire electronic properties and ultimately dictate device performance. A key contact-free technique at the heart of this proposal is ultrafast terahertz conductivity spectroscopy: an advanced technique ideal for probing nanowire electrical properties. We will develop new methods to enable the full suite of contact-free (including terahertz, photoluminescence and cathodoluminescence measurements) and contact-based measurements to be performed with high spatial resolution on the same nanowires. This will provide accurate, comprehensive and cross-correlated feedback to guide growth studies and expedite the targeted development of nanowires with specified functionality. We will apply this powerful approach to tailor nanowires as photoelectrodes for solar photoelectrochemical water splitting. This is an application for which nitride nanowires have outstanding, yet unfulfilled, potential. This project will thus harness the true potential of nitride nanowires and bring them to the forefront of 21st century technology.
Projet ERC : DALI (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. London
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2197167.2 €

Natural language expressions are supposed to be unambiguous in context. Yet more and more examples of use of expressions that are ambiguous in context, yet felicitous and rhetorically unmarked, are emerging. In my own work, I demonstrated that ambiguity in anaphoric reference is ubiquitous, through the study of disagreements in annotation, that I pioneered in CL. Since then, additional cases of ambiguous anaphoric reference have been found; and similar findings have been made for other aspects of language interpretation, including wordsense disambiguation, and even part-of-speech tagging. Using the Phrase Detectives Game-With-A-Purpose to collect massive amounts of judgments online, we found that up to 30% of anaphoric expressions in our data are ambiguous. These findings raise a serious challenge for computational linguistics (CL), as assumptions about the existence of a single interpretation in context are built in the dominant methodology, that depends on a reliably annotated gold standard. The goal of the proposed project is to tackle this fundamental issue of disagreements in interpretation by using computational methods for collecting and analysing such disagreements, some of which already exist but have never before been applied in linguistics on a large scale, some we will develop from scratch. Specifically, I propose to develop more advanced games-with-a-purpose to collect massive amounts of data about anaphora from people playing a game. I propose to use Bayesian models of annotation, widely used in epidemiology but not in linguistics, to analyse such data and identify genuine ambiguities; doing this for anaphora will require novel methods. Third, I propose to use these data to revisit current theories about anaphoric expressions that do not seem to cause infelicitousness when ambiguous. Finally, I propose to develop the first supervised approach to anaphora resolution that does not require a gold standard as a blueprint for other areas.

Mots-clés : semantics,discourse,anaphora resolution,coreference,ambiguity,corpus annotation,games with a purpose,crowdsourcing,bayesian models of annotation
Projet ERC : EXPLORE (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems Engineering
Entité participante : Leibniz University Hannover — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1577500.0 €

Natural sources have been highly important for the discovery of new drugs, offering compounds that possess exciting and potent bioactivities. The development of many promising natural products is significantly hampered by the difficulties associated with the synthesis of novel analogs. The family of ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptide (RiPP) natural products offers a plethora of different, promising bioactivities and highly diverse scaffolds. I propose to develop two new complementary routes to generate modified, bespoke RiPPs in vitro and in vivo: Interchangeable leader peptide (ILP) technology, which is a novel approach tailored to RiPPs. Every RiPP is produced from a precursor peptide that consists of a core peptide (the eventual natural product) and a pathway-specific recognition sequence that is recognized by parts of the biosynthetic machinery. ILP technology will allow me to swap out recognition sequences and thus combine the biosynthetic machineries from diverse RiPP pathways in a mix-and-match approach to generate new-to-nature, hybrid RiPPs using two routes: (1) We will develop this technology in vitro to take full advantage of non-natural amino acids and other building blocks. (2) We will transfer an optimized, streamlined version to an in vivo setting using peptide ligation in the cytoplasm of E. coli. This will allow us to use the power of genetics to create large libraries of compounds. I will harvest the novel enzymatic modifications enabled by ILPs to generate diverse RiPP scaffolds that contain amino acids, non-natural amino acids, enzymatically modified amino acids and non-a-amino acid building blocks. We will then use ILP technology to identify novel pathoblockers for Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The successful completion of this project will revolutionize the design of RiPPs-inspired next generation libraries with diverse scaffolds for application in tool compound development, target identification and drug discovery.

Mots-clés : natural products,ripps,engineering
Projet ERC : SoftML (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : Utrecht University — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499918.75 €

Nature displays fascinating examples of self-assembled materials that reconfigure and respond to external stimuli, e.g. chameleons change color for camouflage, pine cones release seeds upon a change in humidity. Advances in colloid synthesis have resulted in a diversity of self-assembled nanostructures with interesting functional properties. These nanostructures are however passive! The aim of this project is to explore the new physics that emerges when static nanostructures are elastically coupled to a soft elastic matrix or hydrogel, e.g. nanoparticles with (cross-linked) ligands, core-shell microgel particles. These hydrogels can be actuated by pH, temperature, light, resulting in a (de)swelling of the gel and a reconfiguration of the nanostructure. Reconfigurable dynamic materials are interesting for applications, but their rational design remains a major challenge as it requires a detailed comprehension of the highly non-trivial coordination of dynamic behaviors of materials across different time and length scales. Using extensive simulations, coarse-graining and machine learning, I propose to unravel the microscopic origin of the structural and dynamic behavior of soft reconfigurable materials. I will build coarse-grained models at multiple levels to study the structure and properties of these soft materials. I will then investigate the dynamics and shape transformation kinetics of the nanostructure and hydrogel upon actuation. The final goal is to reverse-engineer using evolutionary algorithms new classes of soft responsive materials from the atomic scale by designing colloids that self-assemble at the mesoscale into large-scale structures, to the macroscopic scale by tailoring the shape-morphing properties. This research will produce unprecedented insight, novel simulation methods, and fundamental models for the rational design of soft responsive materials that arise from the hierarchical assembly of structures and their dynamic behaviors across scales.

Mots-clés : colloids,nanoparticles,self assembly,computer simulations
Projet ERC : DNA Funs (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1997500.0 €

Nature has evolved astonishingly diverse structures where the nanoscale assembly of components is key to their functionality. Such nanostructures self-assemble at massive scales and at spatial resolutions surpassing top-down production techniques. The leaves of a single tree, e.g., can cover the area of 10.000 m^2 while every mm^2 contains more than 10^8 highly efficient light-harvesting complexes. For future photovoltaic devices, light-managing surfaces and photonic devices it will thus be beneficial to adopt principles of self-assembly. Advances in design and low-cost production of DNA nanostructures allow us to challenge nature. By combining the assembly power of bottom-up DNA origami with top-down lithography it will be possible to fabricate functional nanostructured materials designed on the molecular level while reaching macroscopic dimensions. With the goal to boost energy conversion rates, I will design DNA structures that grow from pre-patterned surfaces and assemble into interpenetrating 3D networks that exhibit the highest possible contact area for electron donor and acceptor molecules in organic photovoltaic devices. Spectral tuning through carefully designed dye arrangements will complement these efforts. Custom-tailored photonic crystals built from lattices of DNA origami structures will control the flow of light. By incorporating dynamic DNA reconfigurability and colloidal nanoparticles at freely chosen positions, intelligent materials that respond to external cues such as light or heat are projected. Positioning accuracy of 1 nm renders possible the emergence of so-called “Dirac plasmons” in DNA-assembled particle lattices. Such topologically protected states are sought after for the coherent and loss-less propagation of energy and information in next-generation all-optical circuits. These approaches have the potential to reduce production costs and increase efficiencies of light-harvesting devices, intelligent surfaces and future computing devices.

Mots-clés : dna nanotechnology,plasmonics,organic electronics,photonic crystals,topological plasmonics
Projet ERC : STEREOPOL (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : University of Warwick — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 452852.16 €

Nature has evolved the ability to create large and complex molecules in which the 3-dimensional orientation of the atoms is critical to their performance. The essential nature of stereochemistry to the structure, and hence performance, of biopolymers makes it reasonable to expect such aspects of synthetic materials to be equally important. This area has however received little study, which is partially a consequence of the significant challenges of creating large macromolecules with well-defined stereochemistry at each repeat unit. This proposal is inspired by nature, to design polymers with exquisite structural control in which the behaviour and properties of the resultant materials will be dependent on their stereochemistry. Specifically, it will address the limitations in synthetic methodology for creating complex, functional stereocontrolled polymers and demonstrate the true potential of harnessing polymer materials with controlled stereochemistry. We will achieve this by focussing on the development of new methodologies for stereocontrolled ring-opening polymerisation of cyclic esters such that we will be able to readily access stereoregular, functional polymers, including achieving unique sequence controlled materials. While one focus will be on utilising renewable resources and green polymer synthesis methodologies, we will also take the first steps to demonstrating the utility of these novel materials by investigating the effects of stereochemistry on the bulk properties of materials as well as its ability to drive crystallisation-driven self-assembly and stereo-responsive nanoparticle behaviour for delivery applications. Achieving these goals promises to take polymers into the 3rd dimension and lead to significant technological breakthroughs in nanotechnology, medicine and sustainable materials among other areas of key future technological importance.

Mots-clés : stereocontrolled ring opening polymerisation,sequence controlled polymers,crystallisation driven self assembly
Projet ERC : REPCOR (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Bocconi University — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 651950.0 €

Nearly all activities in which the public sector is involved, from defense to transportation, from education to healthcare, require the public sector to procure works or goods from private contractors. Thus, it is crucial that the procedures through which procurement occurs be designed to avoid waste and enhance social welfare. Preventing corruption and ensuring contractor compliance with their obligations constitute primary design goals. Nevertheless, very limited evidence exists as to how different awarding methods are susceptible to corruption, and how contractors’ past reputation should be used to award new tenders. This research proposal describes three empirical projects that will advance the frontier of our understanding of the roles of corruption and reputation in procurement. Component 1 focuses on the use of reputation in contract procurement. It analyzes the evidence produced by the introduction of a vendor rating system to: i) determine whether the new system induced contractors to improve their performance, ii) determine whether performance improvements caused higher procurement costs, and iii) evaluate concerns on corruption and entry of new bidders. Component 2 focuses on corruption in public procurement. It analyzes evidence on the presence of networks of firms engaged in criminal activities in public procurement to determine: i) the extent of the phenomenon, (ii) the functioning of different awarding rules against corruption, and iii) the use of tests to detect corruption. Component 3 focuses on healthcare procurement regulations. It analyzes evidence on the public procurement of medical devices to accomplish: i) a descriptive analysis of the procurement practices across the EU, ii) an assessment of whether discretionary awarding rules are used to foster corruption or to reward contractors with better reputation, and iii) an evaluation of these procurement practices in terms of patients’ welfare.
Projet ERC : MANNA (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas — Pays : Grèce — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FORTH;ΙΤΕ
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2254109.0 €

Necrosis contributes critically in devastating human pathologies such as stroke, ischemia, and age-associated neurodegenerative disorders. Ageing increases susceptibility to neurodegeneration, in diverse species ranging from the lowly nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to humans. The mechanisms that govern necrotic neurodegeneration and its modulation by ageing are poorly understood. Autophagy has been implicated in necrosis and neurodegeneration, both with pro-survival and a pro-death roles. Autophagic flux declines with age, while induction of autophagy enhances longevity under conditions such as low insulin/IGF1 signalling and dietary restriction, which extend lifespan across diverse taxa. Our recent findings indicate that organelle-specific autophagy, including mitophagy, pexophagy and nucleophagy, is an important, evolutionarily conserved, determinant of longevity. We propose to dissect the molecular underpinnings of neuron vulnerability to necrosis during ageing, focusing on cargo-specific macroautophagy. To this end, we will implement a multifaceted approach that combines the power and versatility of C. elegans genetics with advanced, in vivo neuronal imaging and microfluidics technology. Our objectives are fourfold. First, we will monitor autophagic flux of organellar cargo, during neurodegeneration, under conditions that alter lifespan and identify mediators of organelle-specific autophagy in neurons. Second, we will conduct genome-wide screens for modifiers of age-inflicted neurodegeneration. Third, we will interrogate nematode models of human neurodegenerative disorders for organelle-specific autophagy and susceptibility to necrosis, upon manipulations that alter lifespan. Fourth, we will investigate the functional conservation of key mechanisms in mammalian models of neuronal necrosis. Together, these studies will deepen our understanding of age-related neurodegeneration and provide critical insights with broad relevance to human health and quality of life.

Mots-clés : autophagy,c  elegans,dietary restriction,mitophagy,microfluidics,multi photon imaging,necrosis,neurodegeneration,nucleophagy,pexophagy