Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : LIVIN (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
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 : 1998863.0 €

The goal of this research is to develop a chip scale toolkit for exploring light-vapour interactions at the nanoscale. The integration of hot vapour cells with nanophotonics technology will be used for enhancing the interaction of light with vapours and for constructing miniaturized devices. Our main objectives are: I-developing an advanced and versatile platform which allows for the construction of miniaturized devices bringing together photonics/plasmonics and atomic vapours. II-exploring the science of light-vapour interactions at the nanoscale. III–exploiting the benefits and the uniqueness of our approach for mitigating challenging applications. Two major platforms will be studied in great details. One is based on combining vapour cells with nanoscale dielectric waveguides and resonators, while the other consists of nanoscale plasmonic structures integrated with hot vapour cells. Using these platforms, plethora of physical effects will be studied and important applications will be demonstrated. Few examples include the study of atomic transitions near surfaces, weak and strong coupling between photonic and atomic resonant systems, slow and fast light effects, nonlinear optics, frequency standards and magnetometry. The proposed approach provides unique features, e.g. high optical densities, low power consumption, well-controlled coupling and small device footprint together with true chip scale integration. For example, owing to the enhanced light-vapour interaction and the small volume of the optical mode, it allows to explore few photons-few atoms interactions, with the ultimate goal of demonstrating effects in the single photon level regime. Given the uniqueness of our approach, the successful implementation of the proposed research should provide an outstanding playground for conducting basic and applied research in the fields of nanophotonics, plasmonics and atomic physics, and will serve as a landmark for constructing novel miniaturized quantum devices.

Mots-clés : nanophotonics,plasmonics
Projet ERC : VIDOCK (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: Biological Mechanisms, Structures and Functions
Entité participante : Conservatoire national des arts et métiers — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNAM
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498791.25 €

The goals of structural biology include developing a comprehensive understanding of the molecular shapes and forms embraced by biological macromolecules and extending this knowledge to understand how different molecular architectures are used to perform the chemical reactions that are central to life. Since the first resolution of protein structures by X-ray crystallography and NMR, structural biology seeks to provide this picture of biological phenomena at the molecular and atomic level by analyzing 3D structures. In the present proposal, we propose to change this paradigm by changing the mode of representation of protein surfaces to 2D maps. That will open new avenues for 1. the development of innovative high-throughput computation of protein interactions and relationships and 2. the emergence of new forms of visualization and analysis of protein structures and properties. We will apply this powerful tool of conformal mapping to structural biology by representing protein surfaces that are complex 3D surfaces in 2D conformal maps that we will call positive conformal maps. We will extend this representation by also generating the 2D conformal maps of the negatives of the 3D surface of the proteins. These positive and negative 2D conformal maps of the surface of proteins will constitute a new representation of the protein surfaces that will be the basis for innovative high-throughput and/or interactive simulation methods, visualization methods and more generally that will give an other insight on the structure of proteins. The major impact of this proposal lies in the fact that it will at last open the gates of the long awaited proteome docking. Using a simplified representation of protein surfaces will allow to perform faster complete cross docking calculations and create a new classification of the protein structures based on their surficial similarity.

Mots-clés : algorithms,interactive docking,protein protein,protein ligand,conformal mapping,structural biology,serious game,high throughput docking,surfacial similarity
Projet ERC : SALAMANDRA (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Sherbrooke — Pays : Canada — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3179640.0 €

The goals of this project are to decipher how the interplay between central and peripheral mechanisms controls locomotion in four legged animals (tetrapods) and to the delineate the reorganization of motor circuits linked to functional regeneration after spinal cord lesion. We will take advantage of the evolutionarily conserved traits of neural structures in vertebrates to address these two fundamental questions by using salamanders as model organisms. Salamanders are best suited to these aims for two main reasons: First, because they have an anatomically simplified nervous system, which yet possesses the main features of all tetrapods; second, because they have unique regeneration abilities among vertebrates and can functionally repair their spinal cord after full transection. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will investigate the dynamic interactions between the nervous system, the body, and its environment before and after spinal cord lesion. We will combine numerical models of locomotor neural circuits, robotics, and advanced functional analyses in genetically modified salamanders in a way that will allow us to test biological data in neuromechanical models (simulations and robots) and, conversely, to validate model-based predictions in animals. Through the concerted and tightly collaborative activities in our laboratories, implementing state of the art assays ranging from the molecular to the organism level, we expect to create a blueprint of tetrapod locomotion control: how appropriate movements are generated in response to various environmental or intrinsic stimuli, and how such function can be recovered after injury. The synergy between our groups of complementary expertise will boost scientific research at multiple levels, not only in the field of neuroscience but also in regeneration research, robotics, and numerical modeling.

Mots-clés : salamander,locomotion,regeneration,spinal cord,descending pathways,transgenic newts,musculoskeletal system,biorobotics
Projet ERC : AllOptHIPP (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
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 : 1486797.0 €

The hippocampus is critical for the storage of episodic memories and has been extensively studied on its role in spatial memory. The hippocampus is also a central model for in vitro studies on the molecular, cellular and microcircuit basis for learning and memory. I propose to use a new technology that I developed to record and manipulate the membrane potential of multiple neurons, simultaneously, in behaving animals to reveal the mechanisms by which hippocampal circuits process spatial information. This research will bridge the gap between the in vitro mechanistic studies and the in vivo efforts to describe the spatial representations. I first propose to employ the voltage imaging technology for detailed mechanistic studies of the function and plasticity of hippocampal microcircuits during place cell formation (Objective 1). To this end, we will combine voltage imaging with Optogenetics in head-fixed mice performing virtual navigation in familiar and novel environments. To expand to a ‘systems’ view on hippocampal plasticity, we will next establish a method for optical selection of single neurons based on their functional profile (Objective 2). We will use this technology to trace the long-range projections and the pre- and postsynaptic landscape of photo-selected CA1 neurons. In the last objective, we will combine both technologies to dissect the contribution of different entorhinal cell types (i.e. grid cells, border cells, and speed cells) to place cell formation in CA1 (objective 3). To this end, we will image the entorhinal cortex and photo-select cells based on their functional profiles. We will then image CA1 while manipulating the activity of the selected entorhinal cells. Our work will provide new discoveries on the mechanistic basis for spatial memory and will comprise a first step towards broader understanding of how the brain stores and retrieves episodic memories.

Mots-clés : spatial memory,voltage imaging,optogenetics
Projet ERC : HumAN (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Autonomous University of Madrid — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UAM
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 693333.98 €

The hippocampus is crucial for learning and memory and it hosts an extraordinary form of plasticity: the generation of new neurons throughout life, a process named adult hippocampal neurogenesis (AHN). Newly generated neurons grow in a specialised niche composed of unique vascular, glial, and neuronal elements. Impaired AHN leads to cognitive dysfunction and mood dysregulation in rodents. Recent work by my group reveals the persistence of AHN until the tenth decade of human life, as well as impairment of this process in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The general aim of HumAN is to unveil the features that confer the human hippocampus with neurogenic potential, thoroughly characterising this niche in adulthood, physiological aging, and pathological conditions (AIM 1), and to identify potentially unique AHN signatures for specific neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases (AIM 2). Moreover, we will determine, for the first time, whether new neurons integrate efficiently into the human hippocampus (AIM 3) and we will interrogate the subcellular machinery of these cells to unravel the mechanisms underlying AHN impairments in these diseases (AIM 4). The unprecedented quality of our collection of human hippocampal samples, obtained from 180 individuals (either controls or with specific neurodegenerative or psychiatric diseases), allows successful application of trail-blazing methodologies such as RNAscope, iterative indirect immunofluorescence imaging (4i)-microscopy, and super-resolution and stimulated emission depleted (STED) nano-resolution microscopy. HumAN will break new ground in the field of AHN by deepening our understanding not only of the mechanisms that control the maturation and synaptic integration of newly generated cells in human beings, but also of the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases, thereby facilitating the identification of potential novel therapeutic targets for these as yet incurable conditions.

Mots-clés : adult hippocampal neurogenesis,human hippocampus,neurodegenerative diseases,neuronal maturation
Projet ERC : EvolPhysiol (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : University of Vienna — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Univie
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499998.0 €

The history of life is a subject that attracts the interest from both researchers and the society in general - it is in the human nature to wonder about our own history. Our only sources of information about microbial evolution reside in genomic data and geological records. Major advances in sequencing techniques are overwhelming databases with rich and novel insights into microbial taxonomic diversity, in particular about new uncultured lineages. Through metagenomics we now know that they are there but we still do not understand what they are doing.The key to that understanding is not genomics, it is physiology.Our main impediment to understand environmental microbial life is our lack of insights into the physiology of newly discovered lineages, how they harness and conserve energy.While phylogenetic trees based on universal genes can be generated for thousands of lineages at a time, they do not represent the genome as a whole and, most importantly, due to lateral gene transfer, branching patterns in the tree of life have never correlated well with key physiological traits.The goal of this proposal, whose focus is physiology, is to better understand how microbes harness energy from available environmental sources, how they learned to use new ones, and how this process unfolded during microbial evolution.This will involve i) large-scale comparative phylogenetic analysis of genes involved in and genomically associated with physiology combined with ii) experimental data, using as evolutionary constraints geochemical records of available environmental energy sources.With a top-down approach this work will successively eliminate among extant biological traits ones that cannot be ancient, constraining the physiological space of older microbial solutions.This proposal will lead to testable predictions regarding the order of events in evolutionary bioenergetic transitions, the focus on biological energy harnessing will narrow the gap between geochemistry and microbiology.

Mots-clés : physiology,bioenergetics
Projet ERC : ORDERin1D (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : University of Antwerp — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UAntwerp
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499425.0 €

The hollow structure of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) with a wide range of diameters forms an ideal one-dimensional host system to study restricted diameter-dependent molecular transport and to achieve unique polar molecular order. For the ORDERin1D project, I will capitalize on my recent breakthroughs in the processing, filling, chiral sorting and high-resolution spectroscopic characterization of empty and filled CNTs, aiming for a diameter-dependent characterization of the filling with various molecules, which will pave the way for the rational design of ultraselective filtermembranes, sensors, nanofluidic devices and nanohybrids with unseen control over the structural order at the molecular scale. In particular, I recently found that dipolar molecules naturally align head-to-tail into a polar array inside the CNTs, after which their molecular directional properties such as their dipole moment and second-order nonlinear optical responses add up coherently, groundbreaking for the development of nanophotonics applications.

Mots-clés : carbon nanotubes,confinement,hybrid nanomaterials,nanofluidics
Projet ERC : ECOLANG (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, 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 : 2221020.0 €

The human brain has evolved the ability to support communication in complex and dynamic environments. In such environments, language is learned, and mostly used in face-to-face contexts in which processing and learning is based on multiple cues: linguistic (such as lexical, syntactic), but also discourse, prosody, face and hands (gestures). Yet, our understanding of how language is learnt and processed, and its associated neural circuitry, comes almost exclusively from reductionist approaches in which the multimodal signal is reduced to speech or text. ECOLANG will pioneer a new way to study language comprehension and learning using a real-world approach in which language is analysed in its rich face-to-face multimodal environment (i.e., language’s ecological niche). Experimental rigour is not compromised by the use of innovative technologies (combining automatic, manual and crowdsourcing methods for annotation; creating avatar stimuli for our experiments) and state-of-the-art modelling and data analysis (probabilistic modelling and network-based analyses). ECOLANG studies how the different cues available in face-to-face communication dynamically contribute to processing and learning in adults, children and aphasic patients in contexts representative of everyday conversation. We collect and annotate a corpus of naturalistic language which is then used to derive quantitative informativeness measures for each cue and their combination using computational models, tested and refined on the basis of behavioural and neuroscientific data. We use converging methodologies (behavioural, EEG, fMRI and lesion-symptom mapping) and we investigate different populations (3-4 years old children, healthy and aphasic adults) in order to develop mechanistic accounts of multimodal communication at the cognitive as well as neural level that can explain processing and learning (by both children and adults) and can have impact on the rehabilitation of language functions after stroke.

Mots-clés : neurobiology of language,gestures,face to face communication
Projet ERC : ECOLANG (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Brighton — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 12414.24 €

The human brain has evolved the ability to support communication in complex and dynamic environments. In such environments, language is learned, and mostly used in face-to-face contexts in which processing and learning is based on multiple cues: linguistic (such as lexical, syntactic), but also discourse, prosody, face and hands (gestures). Yet, our understanding of how language is learnt and processed, and its associated neural circuitry, comes almost exclusively from reductionist approaches in which the multimodal signal is reduced to speech or text. ECOLANG will pioneer a new way to study language comprehension and learning using a real-world approach in which language is analysed in its rich face-to-face multimodal environment (i.e., language’s ecological niche). Experimental rigour is not compromised by the use of innovative technologies (combining automatic, manual and crowdsourcing methods for annotation; creating avatar stimuli for our experiments) and state-of-the-art modelling and data analysis (probabilistic modelling and network-based analyses). ECOLANG studies how the different cues available in face-to-face communication dynamically contribute to processing and learning in adults, children and aphasic patients in contexts representative of everyday conversation. We collect and annotate a corpus of naturalistic language which is then used to derive quantitative informativeness measures for each cue and their combination using computational models, tested and refined on the basis of behavioural and neuroscientific data. We use converging methodologies (behavioural, EEG, fMRI and lesion-symptom mapping) and we investigate different populations (3-4 years old children, healthy and aphasic adults) in order to develop mechanistic accounts of multimodal communication at the cognitive as well as neural level that can explain processing and learning (by both children and adults) and can have impact on the rehabilitation of language functions after stroke.

Mots-clés : neurobiology of language,gestures,face to face communication
Projet ERC : RegNK (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and Immunotherapy
Entité participante : Leibniz Association — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2497500.0 €

The human immune system has evolved sophisticated mechanisms to recognize and eliminate infected, stressed or cancer cells. Presentation of antigens by HLA-I enables the identification of diseased cells by antigen-specific T cells, while changes in HLA-I expression levels are sensed by NK cells. Many human NK cell receptors bind HLA-I; but whether and how NK cells might interact with HLA-II remained unknown. We recently discovered that a subset of commonly expressed HLA-DP molecules serve as ligands for the natural cytotoxicity receptor NKp44, implicating HLA-II in the regulation of NK cells. Remarkably, the strength of NKp44-binding to HLA-DP was dependent on both the HLA-DP allotype and the HLA-DP-presented peptide. The ability of NK cell receptors to bind HLA-II molecules represents a paradigm shift from previous models describing NK cell function largely in the context of HLA-I, and suggests a novel regulatory framework in which NK cells interact directly with HLA-II-expressing cells, including APCs and activated stroma cells. HLA-DP allotypes have been associated with the incidence and outcome of several infectious and inflammatory diseases, and the newly identified interactions between HLA-DP and NKp44 now provide a molecular mechanism implicating NK cells in the pathogenesis of these diseases. As NKp44 and HLA-DP are not expressed in mice, but have evolved recently in primates and humans, studies investigating the underlying mechanisms have to be performed in humans. The applicant proposes an innovative and integrated research program, combining functional immunological and virological approaches with recently developed human organoid systems and proteomics technologies to investigate the impact of interactions between NKp44 and HLA-DP for human diseases, with the ultimate goal to harness NK cells for immunotherapeutic interventions against infections and inflammatory diseases.

Mots-clés : nk cells,hla class ii,hla dp,nkp44,gvhd,primary sclerosing cholangitis