Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : AllergenDetect (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems
Entité participante : Weizmann Institute of Science — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Over the last 50 years, allergies have become a major health issue affecting approximately 20% of adults and more than 30% of children in developed countries. Allergies impair the life quality of affected individuals and diagnosis/treatment is costly for health care systems. In the EU, the avoidable indirect costs of patients insufficiently treated for allergy is estimated to range between 55 and 151 billion Euro per year. A key issue towards fighting this allergy epidemic lies in the diagnosis of allergies, which is still limited by expensive, low throughput methods allowing to test only a few dozens of allergens at once. Yet, several thousands of allergens have been reported in the literature and cost effective methods for testing hundreds or even thousands of allergens are highly sought after. Here, we propose a novel high throughput method (AllergenDetect) enabling to test more than 3000 protein allergens in parallel within a single test, relying on our ERC-funded technology. Instead of cumbersomely purifying protein allergens from natural sources, we will apply synthetic DNA libraries to produce allergens using expression systems commonly applied in biotechnology. Our method greatly expands the throughput of allergen testing compared to state of the art methods and allows for the first time to systematically test all known protein allergens at a fraction of today’s cost and within a single assay. In the first phase, we plan to market this technology as diagnostic kits to hospitals and analytic laboratories that have the required infrastructure already in place. For patient samples from private practitioners, specialized allergists, and individuals seeking allergy testing on their own, we are planning to launch a spin-off laboratory directly performing these AllergenDetect tests.

Mots-clés : allergies,allergy epidemic,allergens,molecular diagnostics,synthetic dna library,high throughput assay,phage display,antibodies,antibody detection,machine learning
Projet ERC : CLaSS (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Leeds — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 140395.0 €

Over the last 8000 years, the Fertile Crescent of the Near East has seen the emergence of cities, states and empires. Climate fluctuations are generally considered to be a significant factor in these changes because in pre-industrial societies they directly relate to food production and security. In the short term, ‘collapse’ events brought about by extreme weather changes such as droughts have been blamed for declines in population, social complexity and political systems. More broadly, the relationships between environment, settlement and surplus drive most models for the development of urbanism and hierarchical political systems. Studies seeking to correlate social and climatic changes in the past tend either to focus on highly localised analyses of specific sites and surveys or to take a more synthetic overview at much larger, even continental, scales. The CLaSS project will take a ground breaking hybrid approach using archaeological data science (or ‘big data’) to construct detailed, empirical datasets at unprecedented scales. Archaeological settlement data and archaeobotanical data (plant and tree remains) will be collated for the entire Fertile Crescent and combined with climate simulations derived from General Circulation Models using cutting edge techniques. The resulting datasets will represent the largest of their kind ever compiled, covering the period between 8000BP and 2000BP and an area of 600,000km2. Collecting data at this scale will enable us to compare population densities and distribution, subsistence practices and landscape management strategies to investigate the question: What factors have allowed for the differential persistence of societies in the face of changing climatic and environmental conditions? This ambitious project will provide insights into the sustainability and resilience of societies through both abrupt and longer term climate changes, leveraging the deep time perspective only available to archaeology.

Mots-clés : social complexity,archaeological data science,urbanism,geographical information systems
Projet ERC : PARAMIR (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
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 : 1633500.0 €

Over the last decades, new discoveries have revealed an ever-increasing diversity of RNA functions, profoundly modifying the conceptual framework of molecular biology. This is the case of micro-RNAs (miRNA), a fascinating class of small non-coding RNA that play essential roles in RNA induced gene silencing and are estimated to target up to 60% of protein-coding genes in humans. RNA functional diversity is often triggered by conformational changes, so capturing the dynamics of these molecules is key to a precise understanding of their function, which in turn is essential to control their activity. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is extremely well suited to investigate dynamical processes. However, the sparsity of measureable NMR data in a RNA sample represents a major bottleneck, preventing so far an accurate description of RNA conformational fluctuations. This project aims to overcome this barrier by developing paramagnetic NMR for RNA. By chemically modifying an RNA, I will introduce paramagnetic tags to strategic positions so as to acquire NMR data from otherwise silent substrate. Adequate computational and analytical models will be developed to decode the experimental data into an atomic-level description of dynamics. These goals require a leap forward with respect to today’s approaches. I propose to achieve this by combining innovative sample preparation strategies and NMR experiments, high magnetic fields, and MD simulations. With these methods, I will enable the determination of the dynamic landscape of let-7, the first miRNA discovered in humans, involved in cell proliferation and differentiation and oncogenesis. This project will yield a broadly applicable method for the structural and dynamic characterization of RNA with unprecedented details. This knowledge will improve our fundamental biochemical and biophysical conception of RNA, opening new avenues for bioengineering and establishing the bases for rational RNA-oriented drug discovery.

Mots-clés : nmr spectroscopy,micro rna,paramagnetic nmr,conformational dynamics,let 7,rna induced silencing complex,molecular dynamic simulations
Projet ERC : GlobalOrthodoxy (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : Radboud University Nijmegen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2467260.0 €

Over the last fifty years, Oriental Orthodox Christians (Armenians, Copts, Syriacs/Arameans, Ethiopians and Eritreans) from the Middle East and Africa have settled in Europe, fleeing war-related violence and societal pressures. One of the prominent aspects of religious practice of these transnational Oriental communities is their strong emphasis on the writing and publishing of texts. These include traditional religious texts (from liturgy to history), re-translated and re-contextualized texts, and completely new texts. From simple leaflets and books to sophisticated internet productions where text is persuasively embedded in sound and image, these textual practices aim to transmit the religious heritage to a new generation in an increasingly globalized context. Scholarship has largely ignored these texts, being too popular or too modern for scholars of the written religious traditions and too textual for social scientists working on these transnational communities, even though they make up a crucial source for the study of these communities’ European integration, especially as to the hybrid character of many of these traditions, among Oriental and Eastern Orthodox Christianities, and among European and global Christianity. Unfortunately, the popular nature of these texts, whether published on paper or digitally, threatens their long-term survival. The project takes these textual practices as its main source to understand how these Oriental Christians inscribe themselves in European societies and so contribute not only to the transformation of their own transnational churches but also to that of Orthodoxy worldwide. It hypothesizes that diachronic and synchronic comparison among Oriental and Eastern Orthodox churches will show that this rewriting includes the actualization of their religious heritage vis-à-vis ethnic and national self-definitions, vis-à-vis European society, and vis-à-vis other churches, particularly Orthodox ones.

Mots-clés : religion    orthodoxy,textual practices   history   transnationalism
Projet ERC : QLIMIT (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : University of Copenhagen — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCPH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999468.0 €

Over the last ten years, there has been a growing interest in quantum interference effects observed in molecules. Remarkably, given their fragility in mesoscopic physics, molecular quantum interference effects can be readily observed at room temperature in solution. This robustness comes from the extremely small size of the molecular components (1-2nm) and thereby the small dimensions over which phase coherence is required. The aim of this project is to challenge the limits of molecular quantum interference effects delivering clear predictions of how to realise these effects in three challenge areas. 1. Beyond single molecules: intermolecular interference effects. This work package will investigate interference effects between molecules and in monolayers to find systems where intermolecular interference effects emerge with a long-term view to materials. 2. Beyond classical electronics: Quantum gates Given that interference effects are an indication of phase coherence being maintained across the molecule, we should be able to exploit the quantum nature of the system for more than simply suppressing current. Proposals exist in the literature for realising a quantum computer through scattering, so this work package will investigate use the interference effects in molecules to suggest candidate systems for this type of quantum computer. 3. Beyond electron transport: Controlling vibrational energy redistribution This work package will focus on how to use interference effects to control vibrational energy redistribution within single molecules with an aim of using this to modulate product ratios in organic reactions. This project takes ideas that have come out of molecular electronics and tests the scope of their application in three neighbouring areas: supramolecular chemistry, quantum computing and organic chemistry. This project takes a first step in these directions, and success in any work package has the possibility to open a whole new field of research.

Mots-clés : quantum interference
Projet ERC : MW_INEQ (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
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 : 1006274.5 €

Over the last two decades, wage and income inequality have increased sharply in most developed countries which is causing ever greater concern in the economic and political debate. A central challenge for policymakers is to develop measures that can simultaneously improve the distribution of economic resources and also foster economic growth. In our proposed research, we will study the effectiveness of a particular prominent instrument to achieve this goal - the minimum wage. First, we will provide a comprehensive assessment of how minimum wages affect the allocation of resources. We will examine whether minimum wages improve the efficiency of worker-firm sorting by reallocating workers to more efficient firms, how an increase in mandated wage floors ripples through the wage distribution and affects job flows among firms, and how the policy affects the assortativity of firm-to-firm relationships. Second, we will look at the impact of the minimum wage on different groups in the population by studying its effect on the allocation of jobs among immigrant and native workers. Recent research suggests that there is a link between inequality and intergenerational mobility but whether public policies that alleviate inequality can also contribute to higher intergenerational mobility remains an open question. To fill this gap in the literature, we will study the effect of minimum wages on maternal labour supply, on child development and eventually on intergenerational mobility. The comprehensive agenda outlined in this proposal therefore addresses a more general call for understanding the roots of inequality and for unbundling the structure of low-wage labour markets. We will achieve this by exploiting a combination of high-quality data, unique policy changes and richer models that explicitly consider the role of firms, their wage setting power, and the networks they are operating in.

Mots-clés : minimum wages,allocation of labor,inequality,productivity,intergenerational mobility
Projet ERC : FarCatCH (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, 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 : 1497996.0 €

Over the last years, the landscape of the organic chemistry has been reshaped with impressive advances made in the transition metal-catalyzed carbon-hydrogen (C-H) bond functionalization field. Indeed, the functionalization of building blocks that do not display a reactive functional group but only a simple C-H bond is attractive as it avoids time-consuming and expensive prefunctionalization steps and limits the generation of waste. However, as energies required to break C-H bonds are similar, the differentiation between two C-H bonds and the selective functionalization of only one of them remain a key challenge. Therefore, the available approaches are still unsatisfactory due to important limitations: low reactivity, limited scopes and selectivity issues. In this proposal, a general approach to functionalize a CH bond located at a Far position (from a functional group) by Catalysis (FarCatCH) will be implemented with a special focus on underexplored transformations, affording important sulfur-and fluorine-containing compounds. Herein, I will develop new synthetic approaches for the remote functionalization of molecules based on i) a substrate-selectivity control and ii) the design of new catalysts using supramolecular tools. I will then iii) address a longstanding reactivity issue in organic synthesis: the trifluoromethylation of aliphatic compounds and apply the supramolecular catalysts for a remote enantioselective transformation. Designing a full set of tools as Swiss army knife for the selective functionalization at unconventional positions inaccessible so far, can considerably change the way organic molecules are made. These original technologies will offer new synthetic routes to access original sulfur- and fluorine-containing molecules, compounds of interest in drugs discovery, material sciences, pharmaceutical and agrochemical industry.

Mots-clés : c h activation,remote functionalization,transition metal catalysis,organofluorine chemistry,n heterocyclic carbene  nhc,umpolung reactivity,supramolecular tool
Projet ERC : FirstGalaxies (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2049961.0 €

Over the past 15 years, my team have pushed the frontier for the most distant known objects to higher redshifts, exploring galaxies when the Universe was young using the Hubble Space Telescope and large ground-based telescopes. As well as discovering galaxies within the first billion years (90percent of the way back in time to the Big Bang), our knowledge of the composition of the Universe has also grown - dark matter and dark energy dictate the expansion history and initial collapse of structures which ultimately form galaxies. We now know that the gas between the galaxies, initially plasma, became mostly neutral about 300,000 years after the Big Bang, but again became plasma about a billion years later. The first few generations of stars to form, with a contribution from high redshift quasars, might be responsible for this reionization, but we have yet to find the galaxies accounting for the bulk of the ionizing photons and key questions remain: what is the contribution from the faintest dwarf galaxies in the luminosity function at high redshift? what fraction of ionizing photons emitted by stars reach the intergalactic gas? is the first generation of stars forming from primordial hydrogen and helium more efficient in producing ionizing photons? I am in a privileged position to address these questions, as a member of the ESA Instrument Science Team since 2005 for the near-infrared spectrograph (NIRSpec) on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), due to launch in May 2020. Much of our 900 hours of guaranteed time will be spectroscopy of high redshift galaxies, and I am leading the deep tier of our survey to get accurate redshifts (vital for luminosity functions), measure the stellar populations (ages and star formation rates), assess the escape fractions of ionizing photons and determine the metal enrichment (potentially finding the long-sought "Population III", the first stars to form). With this ERC grant I aim to assemble a team to achieve these science goals.
Projet ERC : N-T-AUTONOMY (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : Austrian Academy of Sciences — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : OAW
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 338000.0 €

Over the past 150 years, non-territorial autonomy has been one of three models for dealing with linguistic or ethnic minorities within several European states. Compared with the other two, i.e. the recognition of minority rights as individual rights and territorial self-rule, non-territorial autonomy has received little attention. This project proposes to write the first history of non-territorial autonomy as an applied policy tool in minority protection and as an intellectual concept with a chequered history across Europe. Intellectuals, politicians, and legal scholars across the political spectrum from the far left to the far right supported this idea, although they were aware of the risks of strengthening national differences by promoting such a collective approach to minority protection. The project explores how this idea of granting cultural rights to a national group as a corporate body within a state, as a means of integrating diverse nationalities, travelled and transformed throughout the Habsburg Empire from 1850 to the present. We propose to 1) trace the development/circulation of theoretical conceptions and political applications of non-territorial autonomy within the Habsburg Empire, by mapping the networks of scholars as well as politicians who advocated for it; 2) explain the continuities in the development of the idea, and its manifestations in policies adopted by interwar Central and Eastern European nation states, where communists, socialists, liberals and fascists alike were able to translate elements of non-territorial autonomy into their ideologies and programs; 3) analyse the treatment of non-territorial autonomy, which was advocated by minority lobby groups, in international minority protection in the 20th century despite strong opposition to practices based on it by international organisations. We rely on a mixture of historiographical methods developed in nationalism studies to analyse the idea’s translation in entangled transnational spaces.

Mots-clés : minority protection,habsburg empire,central and eastern europe,interwar europe,international minority rights,intellectual history,nationalism studies
Projet ERC : ANTNAM (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Proof of concept grants)
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 : 144549.0 €

Over the past 2 years we have developed and patented a new actuator which is based on composite polymer/metal nanoparticles. Originally designed to create strong reversible colour changes, we found that the forces generated in the actuation exceed current microscale devices by nearly two orders of magnitude (weight for weight). We have thus protected and developed this possibility using my Advanced ERC project, LINASS, together with Cambridge Enterprise (CE, the commercialisation arm of the University of Cambridge). We have now reached the stage where we believe that this can become commercially interesting, have progressed to a better understanding of the fundamental processes, and have some idea of the applications that it might enable. The PoC project here is thus conceived to create demonstrators in two related domains: one offers new possibilities in advancing the established technology of microfluidic chips, while the other opens up a new space entirely, by making DNA nano-machines active and feasibly exploitable.

Mots-clés : nanomachine,actuator,plasmon,polymer,microfluidics,pump