Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : EmulSim (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998334.0 €

Biological cells consist of a myriad of interacting biomolecules that collectively arrange in stable structures. For example, molecules undergo phase separation to form so-called biomolecular condensates. We now know that malfunctioning condensates can cause diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and cancer. Yet, we do not understand how condensates become malfunctioning and how healthy cells control them. Some challenges in understanding condensate dynamics are that cells are heterogeneous, have complex material properties, and exhibit significant thermal fluctuations. Biological cells are also alive and use fuel molecules to control processes actively. I recently showed that active chemical reactions could generally affect the dynamics of droplets. However, it is unclear how such active droplets behave in the complex environments inside cells.  EmulSim will study how cells control biomolecular condensates and provide a novel integrated simulation method incorporating relevant processes on all length scales. On the scale of individual droplets, I will investigate the influence of driven reactions and elastic material properties of droplets. On the cellular scale, I will study the effect of the elastic cytoskeleton and the presence of multiple compartments. For each of these processes, I will derive experimentally verified models using examples of relevant biological processes, including cell division, chromatin organization, and signaling. Combining the physical theories for these critical processes will culminate in an agent-based model describing a collection of droplets, ultimately also including number fluctuations. This novel simulation framework will model biomolecular condensates in their cellular environment. Taken together, EmulSim will propel our understanding of biomolecular condensates and lay the ground for the development of novel therapies in medicine.

Mots-clés : soft matter,phase separation,theory,multi scale simulation,biomolecular condensates,cell biology
Projet ERC : FlyActiveComp (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Sensory perception is often an active process, and many animals move their sensory organs to actively shape their interactions with the outside world. Active sensing can provide animals with important information that impacts their survival and overall fitness. We recently found that Drosophila adjust their visual input by moving their retinas underneath the stationary lenses of the compound eye. The discovery of retinal movements in the fly provides us with a fantastic toolbox to study the cellular mechanisms of active visual computation.  We found several types of Drosophila retinal movements, including an optokinetic reflex that likely helps gaze stabilization. The functions of other types of retinal movements we described remain to be shown. We found tiny movements that shift the retina only by a fraction of the angle between photoreceptors, resembling so-called ‘microsaccades’ in primates. In humans, these eye movements happen during visual fixation and their functions are still not entirely clear. We want to understand how flies, which have a very different visual system, benefit from such movements. We also found large convergent, or cross-eyed, retinal movements that happen when flies cross obstacles in tethered walking. Genetic silencing of retinal motoneurons suggested a role of these movements in depth perception. We will probe the visual system during vergence movements to understand how the neural system uses dynamic input to gauge distances. The overarching goal is to unravel neuronal computations that use actively generated visual input to extract information about the world. The fly’s relatively simple nervous system, its rich visual behavior, and outstanding experimental tools will allow for detailed insights into active sensory computation on a cellular level. Results from this work will generate novel insights into how evolutionary distant brains solve similar visual challenges and elucidate differences and common principles across species.

Mots-clés : drosophila,active vision,eye movements,depth perception,spatial acuity,compound eye
Projet ERC : CAPSOLUTION (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2425000.0 €

How do viruses identify their hosts in a challenging environment? This question is highly relevant for protist-infecting giant viruses in aquatic ecosystems, where the density of host cells is typically low and random encounters are rare. Giant viruses have genome sizes of up to two megabases and encode a vast genetic diversity, but we know almost nothing about their diverse capsid structures and the various strategies they use for infecting the next host cell. During the last decade, I have shed light on the symbiotic interactions between marine flagellates, giant viruses and their virophage parasites. With CAPSOLUTION, I will use our collection of freshwater flagellate cultures to characterize giant viruses with previously unknown capsid structures from oligotrophic lakes. We recently discovered two giant viruses with unprecedented capsid modifications: “Cometa virus”, whose capsid has a bundle of unique head fibers and a conical tail; and “Sentinel virus”, whose tentacle-like appendages span several micrometers. CAPSOLUTION will allow me to characterize the fascinating virion structures of Cometa and Sentinel viruses at molecular resolution and elucidate their function during host attachment and infection. What is the protein composition of these appendages and how are they assembled? How did they evolve? How common and diverse are modified capsids among giant viruses and how do they adapt to environmental constraints? I will address these questions in a multi-disciplinary approach combining the morpho-genomic characterization of natural giant virus communities with structure-function studies of newly isolated virus-host systems and evolutionary analyses of their appendage-associated genes. CAPSOLUTION will reveal how giant viruses use unique capsid modifications to adapt to their environment, thereby breaking new ground in microbiology and expanding our horizon of virus functioning in freshwater lakes.

Mots-clés : viruses of protists,viral ecology,virus isolation,electron microscopy,metagenomics,horizontal gene transfer,comparative genomics,experimental evolution,high mountain lakes
Projet ERC : TIME-LINES (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université autonome de Barcelone — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1856196.0 €

One of the most exciting and important research questions in ecology and palaeoecology is how fast, where, and why biodiversity is changing; heated debate on the topic within the scientific community reflects observations of apparently heterogeneous rates of change across the world. Biodiversity responses to different types of drivers of change remain underexplored, because to study these phenomena over the necessary span of years (often centuries to millennia) patterns and processes must be inferred from fossil records. There is also evidence that geographical attributes may mediate biodiversity responses to drivers of change, creating further complexity. That biodiversity change is spatially structured is the main hypothesis of TIME-LINES, which will examine ~5000 years of plant biodiversity change and the drivers of that change using a range of high-quality palaeoecological records derived from sedimentary sequences from islands worldwide. Islands are often described as hotspots of biodiversity and natural laboratories with legacies of relatively recent human impacts. For the first time, it is feasible to build palaeoecological networks at biogeographical scales. TIME-LINES will first establish the historical ranges of variability for both drivers of change and biodiversity. Aligning information on the magnitude of biodiversity change with the geographic properties of islands can then address whether change both at taxonomic and functional levels, is mediated by geographical context. The results will open new research horizons, bringing palaeoecology and biogeography together, and developing methods to quantify the effects of drivers of change—not only for islands but elsewhere, and in much greater depth than has been possible to date. From these findings, we can address to what degree historically informed baselines and change trajectories have utility for sustainable biodiversity management.

Mots-clés : anthropocene,baselines,biogeography,drivers of change,fossil pollen,holocene,human impacts,island ecology,sedadna
Projet ERC : BADEMS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université autonome de Barcelone — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1774225.0 €

What were the cultural creations of black women and men in early modern Spain? How did blaWhat were the cultural creations of black women and men in early modern Spain? How did black women and men shape the cultural productions of the period? More than four hundred texts in early modern Spanish literature include black characters in a variety of literary genres, such as drama and poetry. The vast corpus of literary narratives on blackness has not fully engaged with the fact that Spain had the second-largest black African diaspora in early modern Europe —second only to Portugal— and that black women and men at that period were producers and contributors of cultural creations. With a focus on Spain and in connection with the Iberian World, BADEM will investigate three intertwined areas of Cultural History, Literature, and Linguistics, and provide a new scholarly framework to challenge our understanding of Europe’s past and its people. It will narrate an untold story of both the tangible and intangible cultural heritage that black Africans created, primarily but not exclusively as singers, dancers, actors, storytellers, and painters. It will explore the way black Africans refashioned and contributed to the production of early modern cultural narratives on blackness; and will investigate the African cultural traits and multilingual practices of black women and men, particularly in relation to their cultural mediations. In this way, BADEMS will promote an understanding of the experiences of survival through creativity, the making of blackness, and the processes of identity-building and creolization. The project will accomplish the goals in three domains of research: conducting the first systematic locating of black cultural creators; building a unique open-access Archive of Black Creators; and producing an interdisciplinary narrative about the contributions of black women and men to the literary, and linguistic culture of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Mots-clés : black african diaspora,early modern spain,black cultural creators,transculturality,culture contact,linguistic miscegenation,literary narratives on blackness,cultural performances,ethnic confraternities,iberian world
Projet ERC : READ (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université autonome de Barcelone — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1915691.0 €

Animal domestication is a key topic in Neolithic archaeological research since the early 1960s. The earliest steps of this phenomenon are, still today, very difficult to achieve. Traditional zooarchaeological analyses used to date domestication rely on detecting the appearance of genetically-driven morphological changes in animals. These morphological markers, however, if they occur at all, only appear after the process is well underway, after hundreds, if not thousands, of years, making it difficult to study them. The READ project will build an alternative approach to detect early evidences of sheep and goat management. The project will investigate the historical life-traits of the animals with a high-resolution time analysis by performing biogeochemical analyses on fossil teeth. Scientific approaches employed are not all highly innovative but their combination together with the themes addressed will involve a high-gain. This will allow reconstructing the three clue mechanisms that were pivotal in the lead up to domestication: the control of the animals’ reproductive cycles; the induced changes to their feeding habits; and the interruption of migratory-seasonal movements. The project will evaluate and compare data from what are known to be the three key regions for this research area: the Southern Levant, the Northern Levant and the Eastern Fertile Crescent. READ will analyses a set of the most important and significant available faunal assemblages for these regions and will put together a reference dataset from wild relatives available in museum collections and current living populations found in breeding centres. At the end of the project I will unravel the current unresolved paradigms on the origin of animal domesticates not relying on how the animals changed but rather what the human societies did to change the animals; revealing how early caprine management was done and where and when processes of animal domestication were initiated.

Mots-clés : neolithic,animal domestication,biogeochemistry,stable isotops,south west asia
Projet ERC : ELO-B-Memory (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and I mmunotherapy
Entité participante : Université de Lund — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999983.0 €

This proposal addresses the combined role of early life derived B cells in the adult immune system. Neonatal immune imprinting is now well-established concept. It emphasizes the importance of the early life window to establish host-microbial mutualism and the set-point for immune responsiveness later in life. However, the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying this immune programming are not well understood. Despite the ability of B cells to integrate and store complex immunological memory for a lifetime, surprisingly little is known about its ability to confer the longitudinal effects of neonatal microbial instruction.  By time-stamping B cells that arise early in life, my research team resolved a self-sustaining network of IgM and IgA B and plasma cells that carry memory of neonatal exposure. Such early life origin B (ELO-B) cells are unevenly distributed among immunophenotypically and anatomically defined B cell subsets and make up a substantial portion of the adult B cell pool in unimmunized mice. These findings reveal pervasive neonatal antigenic imprinting of the adult B cell compartment, challenging the assumption that the adaptive immune system is naïve in the absence of deliberate immunization. With this understanding arises an urgent need to dissect the formation and function of ELO-B cell memory and their lasting impact on host protection and long-term homeostasis. To this end, we have built an unprecedented genetic toolkit leveraging the power of our time-stamping approach, to track and manipulate ELO-B cell responses without perturbing adul Overarching hypothesis: ELO-B cells uniquely imprinted by developmental and microbial determinants early in life shape the trajectory of adult immune responses in health and disease.  Aim 1. Dissecting the formation of a complex ELO-B cell layer.  Aim 2. Tracing ELO-B cell derived antibodies and their contribution to adult B cell responses.  Aim 3. Defining the role for ELO-B cells in immunological tolerance.

Mots-clés : neonatal immune imprinting,neonatal b cell memory,b 1 cells,il 10,iga,microbiota,lineage tracing
Projet ERC : HyperSense (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université de Lund — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2597500.0 €

HyperSense will spearhead hyperspectral lidars expanded to exotic spectral regions outside the imaginable by lidar community, and demonstrate stand-off biosensing beyond what can be resolved by existing methods by employing plasma and supercontinuum light sources. Leveraging my patented hyperspectral Scheimpflug lidar concept, adding an uncontested number of spectral bands, spatio-temporal resolution and sensitivity, We will reveal aspects of our biosphere inaccessible by existing lidars. Active remote sensing of our biosphere uncovers details that cannot be resolved in space and time by sunlight, e.g. protein absorbance shielded by the ozone layer, life in dark ocean depths, narrow oxygen lines in a breath or nocturnal movements of disease vectors. Lidar constitute an efficient measurement technique where the same light transilluminates a volume until it interacts with the sample and simultaneously reports range and backscatter quantitatively, whereas hyperspectral lidar also provide microscopic absorption pathlengths, nano-features on biological surfaces, and deformations of electron shells on the picometer scale. HyperSense will explode multiple boundaries of current lidar, demonstrate and revolutionize biomonitoring, by my inexpensive, robust, compact and portable Scheimpflug method. HyperSense comprise 4 novel hyperspectral lidars with short, long, narrow and broad spectral coverage, applied to 8 biological challenges, showcasing light-biology interactions on the micro, nano and picoscopic level: A) DUV lidar (220-440 nm) Biomolecules specificity for classification of pollen and lichen B) Aquatic lidar (400-800 nm) Profile plankton biodiversity using both oscillatory and spectral properties C) Hires NIR lidar (760-762 nm) Resolving O2 and temperature in breath to understand host seeking and hill-topping in insects D) SWIR lidar (900-2500 nm) Quantify the surface nanostructures, internal tissue microstructure and molecular composition of vegetation and aerofauna

Mots-clés : laser remote sensing,lidar,hyperspectral,environmental monitoring,biophotonics,tissue spectroscopy,supercontinuum,plasma sources,instrumentation,infrared,ultraviolet
Projet ERC : Egressibility (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université de Lund — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999499.0 €

The Egressibility project aims at a paradigm shift in the field of building evacuation research by addressing the critical need for inclusive emergency evacuation. While accessibility and universal design have contributed to significant developments in creating inclusive built environments, this research will transform current evacuation design into universally accessible evacuation design, particularly focusing on vulnerable groups such as older populations and people with disabilities. This project is a timely initiative, aiming at shifting the field of evacuation to Egressibility by establishing a scientific discipline dedicated to the safety and security of every person during emergency evacuation, aligning with the broader goals of creating a resilient and inclusive built environment in Europe and beyond. With natural hazards becoming more frequent and more severe due to climate change, ageing populations and geopolitical uncertainties threatening European security, the demand for efficient and inclusive emergency evacuations has never been more pressing. To date, egress provisions and building design tools are still considering adult healthy populations as starting point. By using qualitative and quantitative methods including virtual reality and inclusive machine learning (following the principles of ethical artificial intelligence), the project addresses equal access to safety for all individuals, irrespective of their functional abilities. Egressibility stands at the intersection of technology and a growing awareness of diversity. The Egressibility project will provide a scientifically rigorous approach allowing a paradigm shift in evacuation research and inform policy making and design. This will enable a future in which technology can be used to ensure an inclusive and safe use of the built environment. Egressibility is not merely an academic pursuit; it is a commitment to a fair and equal society.

Mots-clés : evacuation egress,emergency,safety exit choice,route choice,pedestrian simulations,crowd modelling,crowd safety,pedestrian safety,people with disabilities,evacuation design