Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : OxytocINspace (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Technion - Institut de technologie d'Israël — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1860000.0 €

Orienting in space recruits brain mechanisms well conserved across mammalian species. Within the entorhinal-hippocampal network, a core system of spatially-selective cells supports spatial geometry computations. Yet, when navigating familiar surroundings, neural computations of space usually escape our attention. Instead, we parse space into socially meaningful territories. Territorial boundaries are social in nature since they capture the location of utilities available to individuals tied to group hierarchy and affiliation. How does our brain integrate geometry and territory? We propose that this process is regulated by the oxytocin (OT) system, acting on the entorhinal-hippocampal regions. OT, a hypothalamic neuropeptide known for its pro-social effects in mammals, modulates neural activity in the hippocampal formation, but its potential role in territorial representations has not yet been studied. Here, experts in complementary fields – social behaviors, spatial navigation, neurophysiology, anatomy, and cell signaling – will study brain similarities and differences of socio-territorial strategies in five mammalian species: bats, mice, rats, marmosets, and macaques. Our central goal is to investigate how neurons coding for space (e.g. place cells, boundary cells, grid cells) respond to perceived socio-spatial parameters of ownership, utility, and social hierarchies. We expect spatial cells to be sensitive to territorial manipulations (ownership, proximity, intrusion), regulated by OT in a context-dependent manner. OT inhibition may enhance territorial defense when territories are challenged (e.g., conspecific approaches or transgresses borders) and may sharpen territorial boundary representations. Conversely, OT stimulation could blur the boundaries of territorial perception. Our cross-species perspective will be the first to provide information on possible species-specific vs. shared neural mechanisms for territorial maps and OT-induced hippocampal plasticity.

Mots-clés : oxytocin,oxytocin receptors,entorhinal cortex,hippocampus,place cells,territorial behavior,rodents,bats,non human primates,social behavior
Projet ERC : TubulinCode (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3533120.0 €

Microtubules (MT) are core components of the eukaryotic cytoskeleton with essential roles in cell division, cell shape, intracellular transport, and motility. Despite their functional divergence, MTs have highly conserved structures made from almost identical molecular building blocks – tubulin proteins. A variety of posttranslational modifications (PTMs) diversifies these building blocks, which is thought to control most of the properties and functions of the MT cytoskeleton, a concept referred to as the ‘tubulin code’. While they appear to have subtle effects at the molecular level, tubulin PTMs are essential for maintaining cellular functions of MTs over large spatial and temporal scales. Yet, a comprehensive knowledge of the principles of the tubulin code, connecting its functions across the molecular, cellular and organismal levels, is almost entirely lacking. Our project aims to obtain a novel molecular and mechanistic understanding of how tubulin PTMs control long-term cellular function and homeostasis. Our unique approach bridges all relevant scales of biology and relies on a synergy between our powerful experimental models and expertise in biochemistry, structural biology, single-molecule assays, systems-biophysics, cell biology, and physiology. Specifically, we will: (1) Determine how different tubulin PTMs affect biophysical and structural properties of MTs and their interactions with associated proteins; (2) Define the impact of tubulin PTMs on overall MT cytoskeleton behaviour and the resulting physiological implications in neurons; (3) Combine zebrafish and mouse models and develop a novel fish model for lifelong in-vivo imaging to determine how the tubulin PTMs control lifelong MT-based functions. Our work will define the importance of tubulin PTMs by revealing their critical molecular functions over the lifetime of an organism. The project has the potential to substantially change our perception of the cytoskeleton’s role in homeostasis and disease.

Mots-clés : microtubule cytoskeleton,tubulin code,tubulin posttranslational modifications,axonal transport,neuronal homeostasis,zebrafish,mouse,danionella,in vivo imaging,motor proteins,in vitro reconstitution,cell mechanics
Projet ERC : PROTOS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Brême — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2257343.75 €

All information humankind has of the ancient past of our planet comes from analyzing the geological record encoded in rocks. There is, however, no rock record of the first 600 million years of Earth’s history. Unlocking the secrets of this earliest period –the Hadean– is a fundamental task for science, as it is key to understanding how the planet became habitable, when the first forms of metabolism and self-replication developed, and life appeared. The lack of a geological record has led scientists to use computational modeling to make inferences about the conditions in Early Earth’s environments. Less common are laboratory experiments specifically targeted to simulating Hadean conditions. Based on ubiquitous carbonaceous chert deposits in the oldest rock record, it is widely accepted that many early Archean aquatic settings were reducing and rich in silica and some basic carbon-based molecules. We reason that such aquatic conditions were already established during the early Hadean, and inevitably led to the existence of a large-scale factory of simple and complex organic compounds, many of them relevant to prebiotic chemistry and to the route to biomimetic hybrid microstructures able to self-organize and catalyze prebiotic reactions relevant to the origin of life. Our project is aimed at understanding the crucial role of silica in directing the geochemical and protobiological processes, creating habitats for early life, and preserving early biomass on Earth’s surface during the first billion years of its history. PROTOS will use an array of laboratory experiments (the Hadean Simulator) to systematically study ab-initio reactions of water and gases with the earliest rock types in order to determine compositions of aquatic habitats and subsequent silica precipitation mechanisms, organic synthesis processes on silica/iron surfaces, and the preservation of the first remnants of life. PROTOS will change our view of the infancy of the planet.

Mots-clés : hadean,early earth,mineral self organization,serpentinization,silica,self organization,prebiotic,chemistry,life detection,origin of life
Projet ERC : Resilience (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université Ben Gourion du Néguev — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : BGU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2528125.0 €

There is an urgent need to understand the catastrophic effects that global environmental and climate change can have on the Earth, its system components and ecosystems. One area of critical concern is the imminent high-impact, abrupt and irreversible tipping of ecosystems. Recent discoveries indicate that tipping could be evaded and even reversed in ecosystems through spatial pattern formation of vegetation, thereby creating pathways of resilience. Many undiscovered pathways of resilience through spatial pattern formation could exist for tipping-prone ecosystems. This resilience could be even enhanced by the unexplored connection between spatial pattern formation and community assembly. The aim of RESILIENCE is to fundamentally advance our understanding and predictions of tipping and critical transitions in ecosystems and reveal how these can be evaded and even reversed through spatial pattern formation. The RESILIENCE team consists of field-leading and complementary PI’s and is capable of addressing all aspects of this overarching project, linking theory and observation, spanning the fields of ecology, physics and mathematics. RESILIENCE will develop a new theory for emerging resilience through spatial pattern formation and link this with real tipping-prone biomes undergoing accelerating global change: savanna and tundra. Central to our theoretical approach is the novel mathematical connection between the origin of the formation of patterns and their resilience once they emerged. Our empirical approach will include the analysis of existing and new data from in situ observations and drone and satellite-based remote sensing. Our research will reveal which conditions and spatial patterns lead to the evasion and even reversal of tipping. Identifying these conditions and patterns will also expose how human interventions can prevent or reverse tipping and uncover that tipping-prone ecosystems could be much more resilient than currently thought.

Mots-clés : self organisation,spatial pattern formation,tipping points,critical transitions
Projet ERC : STARMORPH (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Fribourg-en-Brisgau — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

STARMORPH is a ground-breaking endeavour with the ambitious goal of understanding plant organ morphogenesis, which will pave the way to engineering plant growth. This is of paramount importance for enhancing agricultural and forestry yields and hence contributing to global food security and environmental sustainability. Plant organ morphogenesis involves differential growth, where various organ parts expand at different rates to create specific structures. A significant challenge lies in understanding these differential growth programs while considering the mechanical constraints imposed by the tissues. The plant hormone auxin plays a central role in differential growth. It forms concentration gradients within tissues, dictating the direction and rate of cell expansion. Mechanistically, auxin can either repress or promote growth in a tissue and concentration-dependent manner, but this biphasic behaviour remains largely unexplained. The extracellular space, cytosol, and nucleus have distinct auxin perception mechanisms and hence STARMORPH pitches an "auxin signature" concept, considering nuanced auxin levels in each compartment specifying an ensemble signal with quantitative and qualitative cell responses for morphogenesis. Currently, auxin subcellular compartmentalisation is poorly understood, and a key focus of the project is to provide a subcellular map of auxin dynamics within a growing organ to uncover how tissue mechanics interact with auxin-dependent growth processes, which will be pivotal for understanding plant morphogenesis. The STARMORPH project leverages a unique combination of plant, cell and synthetic biology, genetics, biophysics and organic chemistry expertise. This interdisciplinary collaboration aims to dissect plant morphogenesis from molecular to organ scales and has the potential to revolutionise our understanding of plant growth and development, with applications in biotechnology and plant engineering.

Mots-clés : morphogenesis,plants,auxin signature,cell wall,mechanochemical constraints,organelles,multiscale biology,hormone quantification,biosensor engineering,developmental plasticity,differential growth,signal integration,apical hook,interdisciplinary
Projet ERC : ADDI (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Fondation Jean-Jacques Laffont - Toulouse sciences économiques — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : JJL-TSE
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2183750.0 €

The Advancing Digital Democratic Innovation (ADDI) project will pioneer the study of digitally augmented forms of civic participation for preference formation and elicitation. While digital technology has, for some time now, been widely seen as being in direct conflict with the needs of a well-functioning democracy, ADDI will realise the true potential of digital technologies in the democratic space. The project will be led by four well-known researchers with expertise in participatory platform design, deliberative democracy, and computational social choice. It will be organised around three methodological pillars - technology, empirics, and theory - and it will serve three core objectives: designing technologies and procedures for citizen deliberation and participation; experimentally testing the impact of digital platforms in deliberative and participatory forums; and understanding the structure of the preferences collected through digitally augmented instances of civic participation and deliberation. The technology track will lead the creation of interventions in the form of open-source platforms designed to digitally augment deliberation and participation. The empirical track will test these interventions using randomised trials in deliberative and participatory forums and will explore the statistical patterns of the preferences elicited in them. The theoretical track, finally, will contribute conceptual and algorithmic tools to elicit, present, and combine preferences in real-world environments, including situations where participants provide incomplete preferences and that involve under-represented minorities. At the end of the project, we will have charted the potential of digital technologies in supporting and improving democratic practices, while also providing a robust suite of scientifically validated open-source tools designed to distribute these capabilities at a global scale.

Mots-clés : computational social choice,collective intelligence,collective will formation
Projet ERC : BLOCKADE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Fribourg-en-Brisgau — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2250250.0 €

The main aim of BLOCKADE is to investigate how blockades shaped the course, outcome and aftermath of the world wars. In both wars, belligerents sought to blockade their enemies, cutting them off from vital resources such as food, oil, information and capital to hasten their defeat. Existing research is contradictory and fragmentary, leaving us in the dark as to the scope and the effects of blockades, just as the world is confronted with new blockades.  Our hypothesis is that understanding the blockades is critical to the era of the world wars (ca. 1900-1960). The blockades affected societies the world over, testing their resilience and vulnerability. They produced new forms of violence and humanitarian care, prompted innovation and learning, and had integrative and disintegrative effects on wartime societies, alliances and the world order. The project’s ambitious approach transcends the traditional fixation on western Europe and integrates actors long seen as ‘peripheral’. It connects the disparate histories of the First and Second World Wars in a single explanatory frame by uncovering the shared generational experiences and learning processes related to blockades, allowing us to assess their impact on the wars and the peace that followed them. The high gain promised by this project comes with the high risk that we might fail to separate the impact of blockades from other effects of warfare; but it is a risk we believe we can mitigate via innovative methodology and careful source analysis.  BLOCKADE requires input from a range of academic disciplines (economics and economic history, international history, cultural and war studies, statistical and digital analysis and many languages). Only the synergy resulting from combining the four PI and the larger team’s different qualifications and research methodologies will realise the potential for high scientific gains with the necessary complexity and range.

Mots-clés : first world war,second world war,aftermaths of war,globalization,deglobalization,violence,humanitarianism,resilience,international order,innovation
Projet ERC : NEMESIS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Milan-Bicocca — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UniMiB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1327103.0 €

Relevant partial differential equations (PDEs) problems of the 21st century, including those encountered in magnetohydrodynamics and geological flows, involve severe difficulties linked to: the presence of incomplete differential operators related to Hilbert complexes; nonlinear and hybrid-dimensional physical behaviors; embedded/moving interfaces. The goal of the NEMESIS project is to lay the groundwork for a novel generation of numerical simulators tackling all of the above difficulties at once. This will require the combination of skills and knowledge resulting from the synergy of the PIs, covering distinct and extremely technical fields of mathematics: numerical analysis, analysis of nonlinear PDEs, and scientific computing. The research program is structured into four tightly interconnected clusters, whose goals are: the development of Polytopal Exterior Calculus (PEC), a general theory of discrete Hilbert complexes on polytopal meshes; the design of innovative strategies to boost efficiency, embedded into a general abstract Multilevel Solvers Convergence Framework (MSCF); the extension of the above tools to challenging nonlinear and hybrid-dimensional problems through Discrete Functional Analysis (DFA) tools; the demonstration through proof-of-concept applications in magnetohydrodynamics (e.g., nuclear reactor models or aluminum smelting) and geological flows (e.g., flows of gas/liquid mixtures in underground reservoirs with fractures, as occurring in CO2 storage). This project will bring key advances in numerical analysis through the introduction of entirely novel paradigms such as the PEC and DFA, and in scientific computing through MSCF. The novel mathematical tools developed in the project will break long-standing barriers in engineering and applied sciences, and will be implemented in a practitioner-oriented open-source library that will boost design and prediction capabilities in these fields.

Mots-clés : finite element methods,error analysis,finite element exterior calculus,hilbert complexes,efficient algebraic solvers,nonlinear pdes,magnetohydrodynamics,porous media flows,fluid structure interaction,virtual element methods,hybrid high order methods
Projet ERC : GRAIL (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université d'Hambourg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : CO-PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 7583329.0 €

Without biological membranes, there would be no life as we know it. Lipid bilayers shield cellular content from the environment, creating defined micro environments with specific functionality. Transport of molecules and information across these membranes is carried out by integral membrane protein channels, receptors, pumps and transporters. Living cells maintain chemical gradients and electrical potential differences across their membranes, the potential energy of which can be accessed by the membrane proteins to perform useful work. Indeed, central processes such as metabolic energy generation and nerve impulse propagation directly depend on these membrane gradients. Due to their core role in the life of cells and in the health of living organisms, such proteins represent the majority of all current drug targets. Therefore, membrane proteins have been the focus of intense efforts to obtain high-resolution macromolecular structure information. However, the current lack of experimental methods to carry out time-resolved structural studies of membrane proteins at physiological temperatures and under physiological gradients leaves a gigantic blind spot is our mechanistic understanding. We will address this challenge by bringing together our complementary expertise in membrane protein biology, time-resolved structural studies, photochemistry and nano fabrication methods. We will link a set of state-of-the-art technologies to build a technology platform, based on a partitioned microfluidic liquid sample environment, optimised for high-resolution, time-resolved, structural studies of membrane proteins by serial electron diffraction from 2D crystals at room temperature and in the presence of physiologically meaningful membrane gradients for the first time. This will allow us to structurally validate models based on biochemical and computational data, and uncover new possibilities for modulation of function by small molecule therapeutics based on allosteric regulation.

Mots-clés : time resolved structural biology,membrane protein transporter mechanism,time resolved electron diffraction,liquid cell nanodevices,photoactivateable molecular systems
Projet ERC : DarkQuantum (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
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 : 2079375.0 €

The unresolved nature of the Dark Matter permeating our Universe is one of the most pressing questions of modern science. It is connected to our very understanding of reality at the most fundamental level. The axion DM paradigm has recently emerged as one of the most compelling hypothesis to solve this question: Dark Matter would be composed by very light and very feebly interacting axions. This paradigm is strongly motivated by theory, and predicts a clear signal in terrestrial experiments called axion haloscopes. Pioneering experiments have reached enough sensitivity to test some realistic axion models in limited mass ranges, so far without a positive signal. However, there is still a large viable axion parameter space to be explored. The methods used to date will be inefficient to perform such a challenging task. Here our DarkQuantum consortium proposes a new way of addressing this gap using quantum sensing technologies and hybrid quantum systems. Specifically, we will combine quantum technologies and well established particle physics environments at CERN or DESY devoted to the detection of axions in the galactic halo. Building quantum-enhanced setups in particle physics environments is extremely challenging and needs expertise from very different fields of physics. Our consortium brings together experts from quantum circuits, very-low temperature cryogenics, quantum measurements and particle physics, to build two quantum-enhanced haloscopes with unprecedented sensitivity and mass scanning range. The novel sensing strategies of the DarkQuantum project could lead to the experimental detection of axions for the first time. Such a fundamental discovery in connection with the long-standing DM problem would lead to a breakthrough in Physics

Mots-clés : axions dark matter axion haloscope axion like particle photon counter qubit transmon high temperature superconductor low background techniques underground physics machine learning