Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : RanvierNodes-WMUnits (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : University College de Londres — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499984.0 €

The human brain is divided into the grey matter and the white matter (WM). The grey matter includes the synapses which are paramount for processing information, while the WM consists of myelinated axon bundles that conduct information between different brain areas. Brain information processing relies heavily on precise spike timing. This raises questions about the preservation of spike-encoded timing information as it propagates across WM axons, which can extend tens of centimetres before reaching synapses. My research challenges the view that myelinated axons merely serve as electrical conduits in the brain and proposes that the WM contains regulatory units essential for processing information along myelinated axons. I hypothesise that nodes of Ranvier, small unmyelinated gaps along myelinated axons where spikes are generated, function as these regulatory units.  My previous findings indicate that nodes of Ranvier play a crucial role in shaping axon excitability and conduction speed, because they can undergo rapid changes in the electrical properties of their membrane and slower changes in their structure. These changes are triggered by variations in neuronal activity and in the calcium activity of astrocytes, whose processes interact closely with nodes. Here, I will combine state-of-the-art microscopy with multiple patch-clamping in mouse and human brain tissue, and computer modelling. I will investigate the properties of nodes of Ranvier underpinning their impulse-regulating functions, focusing on four characteristics that endow them with this ability: their membrane excitability, electrical adaptability, structural adaptability and connections with other cells.  By dissecting the functions of nodes of Ranvier in this way, my research aims to deepen our understanding of neural network intricacies, offering insights into fundamental mechanisms of information processing in the brain, and emphasising the importance of the white matter in this processing.

Mots-clés : myelin,nodes of ranvier,axons,glia,white matter,neural plasticity
Projet ERC : LEAFPACE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inrae
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2013578.0 €

Leaf phenology, the study of the seasonal timing and drivers of budburst, leaf unfolding, maturation and senescence, is the starting point of land carbon (C) cycle models, driving C allocation between organs, and thus largely controlling C budget estimates. It is often cited as one of the largest uncertainties in future climate predictions. Despite centuries of research, the environmental control of leaf phenology is still not fully understood. State-of-the-art approaches empirically relate phenophases to macroclimatic air temperature, unable to capture conditions sensed by the tree (microclimate) or species-specific variability. This translates into models unable to accurately reproduce forest response to climate change. Understanding why trees grow or shed their leaves is thus key to assessing the resilience of forests.  This project proposes a new paradigm for exploring the biophysical and ecophysiological controls of leaf phenology across scales, based on a unified theory linking phenology to species strategy and the coordination of physiological processes in a limiting environment. Key innovations are: (1) new insight into the microclimatic control of phenology through unprecedented monitoring of the bud/leaf energy budget, (2) the identification of the key links between phenology and species strategy, (3) the quantification of the colimiting factors of leaf phenology across scales, accounting for environmental and physiological processes, and (4) the application of a new generation of models incorporating the biophysical and ecophysiological controls of phenology.  These insights are urgently needed to reduce uncertainties in C cycle estimates and to assess the response of forest to climate within the context of the IPCC. These innovations will unlock several domains to which phenology is central (forestry, agriculture) and open a realm of untapped research questions and applications that require robust forecasting of forest dynamics (drought, fire).

Mots-clés : phenology,forest,climate change,biogeochemical cycles,terrestrial biosphere model,remote sensing
Projet ERC : MiStiC (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : VIB
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499938.75 €

Bacteria are among the most brilliant chemists on Earth. They are capable of producing a wealth of structurally diverse natural products with a wide range of applications in medicine, such as the treatment of infections and cancer. The synthetic production of microbial natural products and their transformation into pharmaceutical drugs is often a challenging, costly and time-consuming process due to the structural complexity of these molecules and the difficulties associated with drug solubility and formulation.  An emerging new strategy in disease treatment aims to exploit beneficial intestinal microbes for ‘local’ drug production and delivery. Such commensal bacteria are safe, can be administered easily, and can be engineered to detect diseases and release drugs in adequate local concentrations. However, the current therapeutic platform or ‘chassis’ strains cannot stably colonize the human gut and have so far only been engineered to produce therapeutic proteins, such as hormones or cytokines. As a result, no commensal chassis strains are available to treat chronic intestinal diseases or to produce clinically important natural product therapeutics.  In MiStiC, I propose to revolutionize microbial therapy systems by developing the beneficial, stable and prominent gut colonizer Clostridium leptum as an innovative and superior chassis for long-term health monitoring and chronic disease treatment. I will combine my expertise in molecular microbiology, enzyme engineering and natural product biosynthesis to equip the chassis with a nanobody-based biosensor and biocontainment modules, and optimize it for the expression of natural product biosynthetic pathways. As a proof-of-concept, we will implement these tools and chassis strains for the detection and treatment of colorectal cancer. Together, these innovations will have broad translational applications and will pave the way to a new frontier in the field of microbiome engineering and synthetic microbial therapy systems

Mots-clés : microbial natural products,specialized metabolism,human microbiota,cell factories
Projet ERC : MAD2bully (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Bullying among youth is a major problem with devastating consequences for victims. In order to develop effective anti-bullying programs, we have to understand what drives bullying behavior. Research has mainly focused on striving for high status on the deliberate level, but found only weak associations with bullying. We thus may be overlooking other (status) motivations that impact bullying involvement to a much greater extent. I therefore propose that not only the motivation to ‘be on top’, but also the motivation to ‘not dangle at the bottom’ plays an important role in bullying and supporting bullies. In addition, as some youth may not be able or willing to truthfully report their deliberate status motivation, I propose to examine motivation at the automatic level through implicit and physiological measures. The aim of the current MAD2bully project thus is to uncover the role of status motivation in bullying and following bullies. This will be achieved by examining both the reward value of high status and the threat value of low status, on the deliberate level as well as on the automatic level. To assess these innovative new concepts, I will develop and test new state-of-the-art measures of status motivation in Study 1. In Study 2, I will use these measures in a longitudinal multi-method multi-informant design, together with assessments of bullying and following behavior, and developmental, individual, and contextual risk and protective factors. The insights from this project will radically change our understanding of why youth engage in or support bullying. Moreover, the results from this project will also facilitate bully risk-assessments in classrooms and aid the development of effective anti-bullying and anti-following interventions that target the right type of status motivation for each type of bullying involvement.

Mots-clés : bullying,status motivation,implicit processes,physiological processes,peer relations,schools,popularity,childhood,adolescence
Projet ERC : TICKLISHUMAN (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499938.0 €

Tickle is one of the most enigmatic human sensations: we do not know how a touch can turn into tickle, and why our brain responds to other people’s tickles but not to our own. To date, there is no theory that can satisfactorily explain why touch on certain body areas feels more ticklish than on others, and why some people are more prone to be tickled compared to others. Despite this fundamental knowledge gap, experiments on tickle perception have been extremely scarce, and there is currently no active research on the topic at an international level. In TICKLISHUMAN, I propose a new interdisciplinary approach to understand the neuroscience of human tickle perception, based on modern haptic technology, somatosensory psychophysics, multivariate pattern analyses of neuroimaging data, brain stimulation, and advanced statistical modelling techniques. First, my team and I will establish a stimulation protocol that optimally induces tickle sensations, and we will identify their neural profile. Building upon my findings on how the brain differentiates between self-generated and externally generated touch, we will delineate the body maps where the perception of tickle is amplified and we will determine the brain mechanism that cancels self-generated tickle sensations. Finally, we will model individual differences in tickle perception as a function of central, peripheral, personality, and demographic characteristics. TICKLISHUMAN has the strong potential to radically transform our scientific and popular thinking about the social, motor, and clinical neuroscience of tickle. The novel insights from the project will permit to explore the very undervalued clinical and functional implications of tickle in the next decades, including its use as a cognitive biomarker in schizophrenia and autism, and its evolutionary function across species.

Mots-clés : tickle perception,touch perception,sensory attenuation,psychophysics,cerebellum,somatosensory cortex,haptics,functional magnetic resonance,transcranial magnetic stimulation
Projet ERC : UBEICH (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université de Montpellier — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UM
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1633404.0 €

The existence of Earth's inner core was a major discovery almost a century ago, and since then the timing of its nucleation remains highly debated. This major event in the Earth’s history enhanced the energy necessary to maintain the magnetic field to the present-day, making our planet habitable. Earth has thus escaped the fate of planets like Mars that lost its protective shield. While the community agreed to place the inner core formation at ~600 million years ago in the Ediacaran Period, new evidence of a change in the Earth’s magnetic field regime during the Mid-Paleozoic (416–332 Ma) challenge this hypothesis: Can we better constrain the Earth inner core history? UBEICH will tackle this issue with a new kind of experimental data describing the long-term evolution of the Earth’s dynamo strength. In paleomagnetism, the conventional approaches fail to retrieve ancient magnetic signal from old rocks due to their weathering along their complex geological history. To this end, I will develop a promising but challenging multispecimen-single crystal paleointensity. This pioneering approach can significantly increase the number of observations by extracting the magnetic signal from the protected nanometric magnetic inclusion in silicate crystals with the multispecimen technique developed for other purposes. By providing challenging-to-obtain but theoretically reliable data, UBEICH has the ambition to bring a new light on the deep Earth history between 1.1 and 0.3 billion years by unravelling the inner core nucleation. Far-reaching implications beyond the Earth’s evolution and the origin of the magnetic field are expected, with new clues about the planetary core evolution of all rocky planets to understand the relationships between thermal evolution, dynamo, and planet habitability. This is of paramount importance at a time where amateur astronomers and scientists are discovering many new exoplanets, and especially super-Earth located in the Habitable Zone of their star.

Mots-clés : structure of the earth deep interior,earth s inner core,paleomagnetism,paleointensity,single silicate crystals,gondwana
Projet ERC : SocialDynamics (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499978.0 €

Social anxiety (SA) has a profound impact on social functioning, but there is limited understanding of how SA individuals navigate the challenges of everyday social situations. These challenges consist of deciding how to communicate with others and how to regulate emotions evoked by those interactions, often under time-pressure and swiftly changing demands. Yet, the field has largely neglected the dynamic and socially interactive character of the challenges faced by SA individuals. This project builds on my conceptual innovation: SA should be studied where it matters most, during dynamic social interactions, considering emotion regulation decisions. It also builds on my methodological expertise: measuring neural dynamics during communication. These innovative backgrounds allow me to now develop a new neurocognitive framework for understanding the challenges SA individuals face when dealing with the communicative and emotional demands of social interactions. I will test how SA pairs solve communicative problems under evaluative pressure, while brain activity in each pair is simultaneously measured (WP1). I will use advanced methods to quantify of how pairs use their shared history to explore novel solutions to the communicative challenge. Further, I will identify neural systems supporting the selection of strategies to regulate emotions evoked by social stimuli (WP2). Casting emotion regulation as a dynamic decision-making problem between regulatory strategies moves the field beyond current SA research on the (in)ability to execute a single strategy. Finally, I will test whether difficulties to flexibly deal with communicative (WP1) and emotion regulation (WP2) demands in social settings can be explained by rigidity to adjust behaviour in unpredictable environments (WP3). Explaining the social challenges that SA individuals face in daily live will move the field beyond traditional approaches unable to capture the dynamics of typically changing social situations.

Mots-clés : social anxiety,neuroimaging,human communication,social interaction,emotion regulation flexibility,fmri hyperscanning,eeg
Projet ERC : COPE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Is this worth my effort? Should I persist and push through or give up and move on? We are constantly confronted with this fundamental question. Persisting through effortful endeavors at all costs is often the key to success in modern society. Reduced or excessive persistence is a hallmark dysfunction in many neuropsychiatric disorders (anxiety, depression, OCD, apathy, etc.) with massive individual and societal cost. Despite the urgency to better understand this process, how exactly we decide to cease or persist, and which cognitive, neural and neurochemical systems support persistence, remains unclear. With COPE, I propose a novel neuro-computational theory of effortful persistence, able to predict decisions to Cease or Persist (COPE), and how they emerge from the dynamic multivariate optimization of costs and benefits across momentary and long-term time scales. I propose that persistence depends on how much reward or punishment we expect, how effective our efforts are, and how surprising and unstable the environment is. I will 1) establish and test a neuro-computational model able to simulate effortful persistence, and the neural and neurochemical systems involved in supporting it. 2) I will causally test the neural circuit involved in effortful persistence combining transcranial Focused Ultrasound stimulation with advanced neuroimaging protocols designed to capture activity in small brainstem and midbrain nuclei. 3) I will probe the contribution of 3 key neurochemicals – Dopamine, Noradrenaline, and Serotonin – and use the COPE model as a prediction tool of the impact of pharmacological manipulation on brain systems and behaviour. COPE integrates the algorithmic, neural and neurochemical levels of explanation in a unifying model of effortful persistence, laying the grounds for phenotyping of abnormal decision-making in psychiatric disorders and personalization of treatment selection.

Mots-clés : effort,motivation,computational modeling,noradrenaline,serotonin,dopamine,fmri
Projet ERC : PECAN (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
Entité participante : Institut Pasteur — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1251212.46 €

Bacteria have evolved multiple lines of defense against their viruses, bacteriophages. Such weapons include restriction modification and CRISPR systems that have greatly impacted biomedical research. Studies aimed at uncovering novel defense mechanisms describe an unsuspected diversity of anti-phage systems, spanning thousands of protein families. Several of these anti-phage systems, such as prokaryotic viperins, appear to be ancestors of major eukaryotic antiviral pathways. This striking conservation between eukaryotic and prokaryotic immunity leads me to two hypotheses on which the present proposal is based. First, I postulate that the organisation of antiviral immunity in eukaryotes as an immune system, i.e. an integrated network of various antiviral mechanisms, might be conserved in prokaryotes. This implies that each anti-phage system does not act in isolation, but is rather part of a whole, the bacterial immune system. To explore this hypothesis, I will characterise the distribution of known anti-phage systems encoded in prokaryotic genomes. I will subsequently explore the potential synergies and co-regulation existing between these systems. I thereby aim to build an integrated map of bacteria antiviral immunity. Second, I hypothesise that prokaryotes produce additional small anti-phage compounds, such as the viperin products, with a potential activity against eukaryotic viruses. To explore this idea, I will study the molecular mechanisms of the viperin family. I will then use genomics to predict novel chemical based anti-phage systems and follow up with their experimental characterizations. These projects could lead to the identification of novel antiviral molecules that could be further harnessed in the clinic.  Overall, I expect this proposal to generate new knowledge that will have the potential to radically change our view on the immune systems of prokaryotes and provide new therapeutic leads.

Mots-clés : phages,anti phage systems,chemical defense,viperins
Projet ERC : HOW2DOUBLE (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : VIB
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000.0 €

Many eukaryotes have more than two sets of chromosomes due to whole-genome duplication (WGD) and are called polyploids. WGDs explain many cases of speciation bursts and evolutionary inventions. Some evidence suggests an adaptive advantage of polyploids: the origins of many ancient WGDs correspond to the times of extreme climate change, and contemporary polyploids often occupy harsher environments compared to their ancestors. However, most new polyploids are not as lucky and rarely survive. To explain the cause, predict and manipulate this process, we need to understand the basic principles of polyploidy: (1) how it is triggered, (2) what enables the initial survival of newly formed polyploids, and (3) how they stabilize a population and become successful. My program will comprehensively cover all these aspects, from the functional and genetic levels to the evolutionary forces driving the entire process. I propose a cross-disciplinary approach to identify common polyploidy principles in plant and animal diploid-tetraploid species complexes: Arabidopsis lyrata, widespread plant in Northern Hemisphere, and Neobatrachus, burrowing frogs living in the Australian desert. The approach combines classic genetics with the latest genomics technologies and population genetics analysis of natural herbarium and museum collections across broad geographies. I will (1) expose genetic and environmental predispositions to polyploidy formation by mapping natural variation of the unreduced gametes rates; (2) reveal mechanics and genetics stabilizing meiosis in polyploids, comparing recombination and selection across ploidies; (3) uncover polyploid populations recovery processes after bottlenecks accompanying their origin by reconstructing introgression patterns. Deciphering the mechanisms leading to successful polyploidization across the plant and animal kingdoms will deliver groundbreaking advances relevant across biology, agriculture, and medicine.

Mots-clés : polyploidy,meiosis,adaptation,introgression,population genetics,cytology