Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : HERPES (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and Immunotherapy
Entité participante : University of Würzburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1994375.0 €

Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) is an important human pathogen, which intensively interacts with the cellular transcriptional machinery at multiple levels during lytic infection. Employing next-generation sequencing to study RNA synthesis, processing and translation in short intervals throughout lytic HSV-1 infection, my laboratory made the surprising observation that HSV-1 triggers widespread disruption of transcription termination of cellular but not viral genes. Transcription commonly extends for tens-of-thousands of nucleotides beyond poly(A)-sites and into downstream genes. In contrast to textbook knowledge, HSV-1 infection does not inhibit splicing but induces a broad range of aberrant splicing events associated with disruption of transcription termination. Exploring these fascinating phenomena will provide fundamental insights into RNA biology of human cells. The proposed work combines both hypothesis-driven and innovative unbiased screening approaches. I will utilise cutting-edge methodology ranging from high-throughput studies to advanced single molecule imaging. Thereby, I will detail the molecular mechanisms responsible for disruption of transcription termination and aberrant splicing. I will identify novel cellular proteins governing transcription termination using a genome-wide Cas9-knockout screen. I will develop RNA aptamer technology to visualise and track single RNA molecules suffering from poly(A) read-through. I will elucidate why transcription termination of some cellular and all viral genes remains unaltered throughout infection. I hypothesize that the alterations in RNA processing are depicted by specific changes in RNA Polymerase II CTD phosphorylation and in the associated proteins. I will characterise these dynamic changes using mNET-seq and quantitative proteomics. Finally, data-driven quantitative bioinformatic modelling will detail how the coupling of RNA synthesis, processing, export, stability and translation is orchestrated by HSV-1.

Mots-clés : herpes simplex virus,systems biology
Projet ERC : BioDisOrder (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : University of Naples Federico II — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1983664.64 €

Heterogeneous biomolecular mechanisms at the surface of cellular membranes are often fundamental to generate function and dysfunction in living systems. These processes are governed by transient and dynamical macromolecular interactions that pose tremendous challenges to current analytical tools, as the majority of these methods perform best in the study of well-defined and poorly dynamical systems. This proposal aims at a radical innovation in the characterisation of complex processes that are dominated by structural order and disorder, including those occurring at the surface of biological membranes such as cellular signalling, the assembly of molecular machinery, or the regulation vesicular trafficking. I outline a programme to realise a vision where the combination of experiments and theory can delineate a new analytical platform to study complex biochemical mechanisms at a multiscale level, and to elucidate their role in physiological and pathological contexts. To achieve this ambitious goal, my research team will develop tools based on the combination of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and molecular simulations, which will enable probing the structure, dynamics, thermodynamics and kinetics of complex protein-protein and protein-membrane interactions occurring at the surface of cellular membranes. The ability to advance both the experimental and theoretical sides, and their combination, is fundamental to define the next generation of methods to achieve our transformative aims. We will provide evidence of the innovative nature of the proposed multiscale approach by addressing some of the great questions in neuroscience and elucidate the details of how functional and aberrant biological complexity is achieved via the fine tuning between structural order and disorder at the neuronal synapse.
Projet ERC : EMERGE (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

High-mass stars drive the physical and chemical evolution of the Universe. However, the origin of these massive objects is largely controversial. Three key questions remain under debate: a) Which physical processes determine the formation of high-mass stars? b) How do these stars get their large masses? c) Do high-mass stars form in a similar way to their low-mass counterparts? Galactic surveys link the origin of high-mass stars to the initial properties of their gas embryos. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), I recently proved the existence of a new and fundamental filamentary organization of the gas within the Orion Nebula, the nearest high-mass star-forming region. After leading this key discovery, I propose to investigate the formation of high-mass stars as an emergent process in complex systems. In this novel scenario massive stars are created naturally by the internal interactions within networks of filaments of increasing density. To fully characterize this ground-breaking approach, this project will carry out the first systematic study of (1) the substructure, (2) internal interactions, and (3) dynamical evolution of these filamentary systems across the Milky Way. EMERGE will survey a homogeneous ALMA sample of >30 massive filamentary networks, the largest of its kind, extracted from the first intensive exploitation of its public archive. These observational results will be tested against state-of-the-art simulations using a new generation of analysis tools. The ultimate goal of this project is to statistically quantify how unique multi-scale phenomena generated in these filamentary systems, such as collisions, mergers, and self-gravity, determine the initial conditions for the formation of high-mass stars. This ERC-StG project will solve a current challenging dichotomy in star-formation theory. In combination with low-mass studies, EMERGE will provide a major step towards a comprehensive model of star-formation under one filamentary paradigm.

Mots-clés : star formation,filaments,fibers,clusters,high mass,low mass,cores,molecular lines,observations,alma
Projet ERC : EXSEED (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
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 : 1833406.0 €

High-peak power compact femtosecond lasers allow strong-field interactions that are the basis for high-precision laser micro-fabrication. They also create extreme conditions within the matter, leading to the generation of rainbow light used to produce even shorter pulses and new frequencies that can extend from the X-ray to the TeraHertz domain. However, due to the low conversion efficiencies, these attractive light pulses remain unexploited in the context of laser nano-/micro-fabrication. The main objective of this project is to exceed the intrinsic limits of ultrafast laser material processing by developing novel seeded-control technologies with extreme light pulses. In the proposed concept, seed free carriers are injected into materials from extreme light and then avalanched with perfectly synchronized infrared pulses to extract all potential benefits from modest energy new types of radiation. The project includes the study of interactions seeded with deep-ultraviolet, few-optical-cycle and mid-infrared ultrashort pulses. The expected nonlinear processes with these radiations open new and exciting opportunities to tailor material properties with nanometer-scale spatial resolutions and in the three dimensions (3D) for materials inside which the occurrence of breakdown is, today, inaccessible (e.g. semiconductors). This will lead to the first demonstrations of rapid 3D prototyping by laser of silicon photonics microdevices. A long term objective is to open the door to the use of the most extreme ultrashort laser-induced radiations, including extreme-ultraviolet attosecond pulses that hold promises to reach the highest degree of control in the time and space of the interactions. These and other ideas require investigations on ionization physics by ultrashort pulses at extreme wavelengths. They also require tight control of the ultrafast pulses, broadband manipulations and novel interaction diagnostics technologies that will be developed as parts of the project.

Mots-clés : laser materials interactions,laser processing,ultrafast processes,strong field science in condensed matter
Projet ERC : NeXource (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HHU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1533849.25 €

High-quality electron beams are required for advanced light sources and for high energy physics. Engines of discovery such as free-electron-lasers (FELs) and other bright light sources, are driven by electron beams today produced in km-long state-of-the-art linear accelerators (linacs). A complementary alternative are cm-scale plasma-based accelerators, which are feasible in university-lab scale environments. The NeXource project aims at combining key advantages of both types of accelerators to realize hybrid plasma-based accelerators orders of magnitude smaller and at the same time with electron beam quality orders of magnitude better than state-of-the-art. This has far-reaching impact as it will enable the construction of table-top coherent hard x-ray sources with extreme brightness. This project is motivated by experimental breakthroughs obtained in the E210 collaboration at the linac-driven plasma accelerator facility FACET at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and by the progress at laser-plasma-accelerator facilities, combined with novel conceptual approaches towards beams with unprecedented 6D-brightness by using tailored beamloading in plasma-based photocathodes. A dedicated setup for plasma photocathode prototyping and hybrid plasma acceleration will be established at the Scottish Centre for the Application of Plasma-based Accelerators (SCAPA) to develop beam brightness transformers. This R&D will be complemented by campaigns at SLAC, DESY, Daresbury Laboratory and laser-plasma-accelerator labs in Europe. Start-to-end simulations indicate that hard x-ray FEL’s with ultrahigh gain and other advanced light sources can be realised with such electron beams in university-scale labs, which would have transformative impact on photon science and a wide range of natural, life and material science.

Mots-clés : plasma wakefield acceleration,light source,x ray free electron laser,laser plasma interaction
Projet ERC : COMNFT (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Institut Mines-Télécom — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IMT
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499180.0 €

High-speed optical fiber networks form the backbone of the information and communication technologies, including the Internet. More than 99% of the Internet data traffic is carried by a network of global optical fibers. Despite their great importance, today's optical fiber networks face a looming capacity crunch: The achievable rates of all current technologies characteristically vanish at high input powers due to distortions that arise from fiber nonlinearity. The solution of this long-standing complex problem has become the holy grail of the field of the optical communication. The aim of this project is to develop a novel foundation for optical fiber communication based on the nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT). The NFT decorrelates signal degrees-of-freedom in optical fiber, in much the same way that the conventional Fourier transform does for linear systems. My collaborators and I have recently proposed nonlinear frequency-division multiplexing (NFDM) based on the NFT, in which the information is encoded in the generalized frequencies and their spectral amplitudes (similar to orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing). Since distortions such as inter-symbol and inter-channel interference are absent in NFDM, it achieves data rates higher than conventional methods. The objective of this proposal is to advance NFDM to the extent that it can be built in practical large-scale systems, thereby overcoming the limitation that fiber nonlinearity sets on the transmission rate of the communication networks. The proposed research relies on novel methodology and spans all aspects of the NFDM system design, including determining the fundamental information-theoretic limits, design of the NFDM transmitter and receiver, algorithms and implementations. The feasibility of the project is manifest in preliminary proof-of-concepts in small examples and toy models, PI's leadership and track-record in the field, as well as the ideal research environment.

Mots-clés : optical communication,nonlinear fourier transform,information theory,nonlinear optics
Projet ERC : AD-HOC (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Delft University of Technology — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TU Delft
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

High-speed wireless communication and automotive radars are two applications with huge social and market potentials that can be revolutionized by the development of high-frequency (sub-terahertz) technology. Despite the recent advances in low-cost integrated circuits, the poor performance of on-chip antennas is nowadays the major bottleneck in converting the electrical signals (on-chip) into radiated ones (off-chip). For decades the problem of “surface waves” has prevented the efficient use of radiators on chip. The AD-HOC project aims at exploiting the breakthrough technology of Artificial Dielectric (AD) layers as the solution to the surface-wave problem of High-frequency On-Chip antennas. The processes necessary to micro-fabricate AD layers will be optimized with the goal of achieving reliable manufacturing, while offering design flexibility at low costs. This will allow the wide exploitation of the AD layers, as they can be used by industrial technology providers as add-on components to at least double the efficiency of their integrated circuit front ends. By overcoming the fundamental limitation of integrated antennas, AD layers have high potential to become a “standard” component in all future car-safety and wireless-communication devices. The AD-HOC project will bring this innovative technology to a pre-demonstration stage to strengthen commercialization and scaling-up opportunities.
Projet ERC : CAtMolChip (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
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 : 1985553.0 €

Highly excited electronic states of small atmospheric molecules play an important, but as yet little explored, role in the reactivity, and in the evolution of plasmas, including the Aurora Borealis, in the upper atmosphere of the Earth. Processes involving these highly excited states are very challenging to investigate theoretically because of the high density of states close to the ionization limits where they lie. Therefore, experimental input is essential for the identification of the reaction and decay mechanisms, and the quantum states of importance in future studies. However, experimental techniques that can be exploited to provide this input have only become available very recently. These techniques permit gas-phase molecular samples in these highly excited states to be confined in traps for sufficient lengths of time (e.g. 1 ms – 10 ms) for detailed studies to be performed in a controlled laboratory environment. They include resonance-enhanced and non-resonance-enhanced multiphoton excitation of long-lived high angular momentum Rydberg states of small molecules, and chip-based devices for efficiently decelerating, transporting and trapping these samples. With the support of this Consolidator Grant a new experimental research program will be developed in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London involving laboratory based studies of (1) inelastic scattering processes, and (2) the decay mechanisms of gas-phase atmospheric molecules, including N2, O2 and NO, and their constituent atoms, in high Rydberg states. The planned experiments will be directed toward understanding the effects of static and time-dependent electric and magnetic fields, and blackbody radiation fields on slow dissociation processes that occur in highly excited states of N2, O2 and NO, investigations of collisional energy transfer processes, and studies of the role that these excited electronic states play in the evolution and reactivity of atmospheric plasmas incl

Mots-clés : rydberg states of atoms and molecules
Projet ERC : RAPID (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: Biological Mechanisms, Structures and Functions
Entité participante : Karolinska Institutet — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1846360.0 €

Histone proteins provide a dynamic packaging system for the eukaryotic genome. Chromatin integrates a multitude of signals to control gene expression, only some of which have the propensity to be maintained through replication and cell division. For our understanding of cellular memory and epigenetic inheritance we need to know what features characterize a stable, heritable chromatin state throughout the cell cycle. State-of-the-art methods such as ChIP-Seq provide population-based snapshots of the epigenomic landscape but little information on the stability and relative importance of each studied feature or modification. This project pioneers a rapid, sensitive and selective protein labeling method (termed RAPID) for capturing genome-wide chromatin dynamics resolved over a period of time ranging from minutes to days. RAPID introduces a flexible time dimension in the form of pulse or pulse-chase experiments for studying genome-wide occupancy of a protein of interest by next-gen sequencing. It can also be coupled to other readouts such as mass spectrometry or microscopy. RAPID is uniquely suited for studying cell cycle-linked processes, by defining when and where stable ‘marks’ are set in chromatin. I will employ mouse embryonic stem cell (mESC) as a model system for pluripotency and lineage specification. RAPID will define fundamental rules for inheritance of histone and other chromatin-associated proteins and how they are modulated by the fast cell cycle of pluripotent cells. Using RAPID in combination with other state-of-the art genetics and epigenomics, I will collect multi-dimensional descriptions of the dynamic evolution and propagation of functionally relevant chromatin states, such as interstitial heterochromatin and developmentally regulated Polycomb domains.

Mots-clés : chromatin dynamics,cellular memory,cell cycle,bioorthogonal labeling,unnatural amino acid mutagenesis
Projet ERC : HisMoDetect (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Hebrew University of Jerusalem — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HUJI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Histones are the major structural proteins of eukaryotic DNA. Two copies each of the core histones, H2A, H2B, H3 and H4, form the core nucleosome, the basic unit of chromatin. Histone tails protrude from the nucleosome structure and are subject to a variety of post-translational modifications on multiple residues, including methylation, acetylation, phosphorylation, sumoylation, ubiquitination and polyribosylation. These histone modifications dictate local and global structure of chromatin, rendering it active and decondensed (‘euchromatic’) or suppressed and compact (‘heterochromatic’) by the recruitment of chromatin-binding proteins that recognize and associate with specific modifications. Histone modifications are therefore the basic regulatory unit of gene expression, genomic silencing, developmental programs, cell division and essentially all cellular processes. Understanding this so-called ‘epigenetic’ landscape is therefore vital for all biological mechanisms. Currently a Western blot is required in order to determine the state of each of the dozens of different histone modifications. Because of the growing number of histone modifications, this procedure is time consuming and labour intensive. Here I suggest to develop an antibody microarray to monitor the levels of all histone modifications simultaneously. This method will be essentially useful for any tissue or cell type in any biological process, for diagnosis, prognosis and drug screening. In addition to basic research, our platform will enable fast and reliable screening for epigenetic effects of existing and novel drugs. We believe that such a product could serve many drug companies interested in direct and indirect effects of epigenetic and non-epigentic drugs.

Mots-clés : chromatin,antibody,microarray,histone,modifications,epigenetics