Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : IRMIDYN (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3154658.0 €

IRMIDYN will study the dynamics of redox-driven iron mineral transformation processes in soils and sediments and impacts on nutrient and trace element behavior using a novel approach based on enriched stable isotopes (e.g., 57Fe, 33S, 67Zn, 113Cd, 198Hg) in combination with innovative experiments and cutting-edge analytical techniques, most importantly 57Fe Mössbauer and Raman micro-spectroscopy and imaging. The thermodynamic stability and occurrence of iron minerals in sufficiently stable Earth surface environments is fairly well understood and supported by field observations. However, the kinetics of iron mineral recrystallization and transformation processes under rapidly changing redox conditions is far less understood, and has to date mostly been studied in in mixed reactors with pure minerals or sediment slurries, but rarely in-situ in complex soils and sediments. Thus, we do not know if and how fast certain iron mineral recrystallization and transformation processes observed in the laboratory actually occur in soils and sediments, and which environmental factors control the transformation rates and products. Redox-driven iron mineral recrystallization and transformation processes are key to understanding the biogeochemical cycles of C, N, P, S, and many trace elements (e.g., As, Zn, Cd, Hg, U). In face of current global challenges caused by massive anthropogenic changes in biogeochemical cycles of nutrients and toxic elements, it is paramount that we begin to understand and quantify the dynamics of these processes in-situ and learn how we can apply our mechanistic (but often reductionist) knowledge to the natural environment. This project will take a large step toward a better understanding of iron mineral dynamics in redox-affected Earth surface environments, with wide implications in biogeochemistry and other fields including environmental engineering, corrosion sciences, archaeology and cultural heritage sciences, and planetary sciences.

Mots-clés : soil chemistry,redox,iron biogeochemistry
Projet ERC : INTICE (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2498043.0 €

Icing of surfaces is common in nature and technology, affecting everyday life and often causing catastrophic events. Despite progress in recent years in the area of hydrophobicity, engineered surfaces that can be employed in applications based on their intrinsic icephobicity, going beyond classical additional chemical coatings or heating treatments, are not a reality. Understanding and counteracting surface icing brings with it significant scientific challenges, which form an intersection of nucleation thermodynamics, interfacial thermofluidics and surface nanoengineering/science. This project will investigate important mesoscale phenomena (a term used here to summarily describe phenomena manifesting themselves in the spatial range from the order of a nanometer to a hundred microns), which affect the behavior of water on surfaces with respect to icing. With the resulting, unifying knowledge base, the aim is to identify pathways for the design and fabrication of a new class of intrinsically icephobic surfaces, based on their a-priori engineered composition and texture. Our aim is to identify anti-nucleation and anti-wetting phenomena, leading to surfaces having long ice nucleation time scales, low water contact and retention, and low ice adhesion. The effects of surface texture curvature on ice nucleation, local liquid confinement on freezing point depression, and mesoscale texture features on interfacial thermofluidics, have intertwined and sometimes counteracting impacts on surface icing behavior, which we aim at unraveling, to determine pathways to high performance surfaces. Connected to all this is the employment of advanced surface texture fabrication and methods to perform the necessary experiments, lending consideration to the development of such surfaces for future applications. Beyond icephobicity, this research has clear implications to the characterization of mesoscale phase change phenomena, for multiphase heat and mass transfer processes and devices.

Mots-clés : thermodynamics,heat transfer,wetting,nanotechnology
Projet ERC : Habitat-OASIS (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : Heidelberg University — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 461366.95 €

Icy moons in the outer solar system are prime candidates for harbouring alien life within their sub-surface oceans. Among them Enceladus and Europa are considered to have the largest astrobiological potential. Habitat-OASIS aims to explore the habitability of the ocean worlds of Enceladus, Europa, and other icy satellites using in situ mass spectrometry from on-going and future space missions. At Enceladus (and probably Europa) the ice grains expelled by active plumes carry matter previously dissolved and suspended in the subsurface oceans, allowing constraining their geochemistry. The mass spectrometers aboard the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn are analysing this material and already delivered spectacular science results. Project 1 of this proposal is the refined data analysis of the Enceladus plume material using novel techniques and is the first ever opportunity to explore in detail a potential ocean habitat outside Earth. Newly developed laser-assisted dispersion experiments will be used to acquire mass spectra on a wide variety of analogue materials, enabling the identification and quantification of inorganic, organic and possibly biogenic compounds embedded in the ice grains. Geochemical aqueous alteration experiments and numerical modelling will support further constraining the habitability of Enceladus and extrapolating the results to other ocean moons. Project 2 will leverage the laboratory capabilities from Project 1 to create a comprehensive library of mass spectra in preparation for the upcoming missions visiting Jupiter’s icy moons: ESA’s JUICE Mission and NASA’s Europa Mission. Even if no plume is present both spacecraft will encounter surface material residing in ejecta clouds around the moons that can be connected to subsurface processes. Having analogue measurements available early in the missions will be critical for exploiting their full potential and will maintain the leading edge of ocean world exploration in Europe.

Mots-clés : oceanology
Projet ERC : BiT (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : SISSA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1670830.0 €

If you suddenly hear your song on the radio and spontaneously decide to burst into dance in your living room, you need to precisely time your movements if you do not want to find yourself on your bookshelf. Most of what we do or perceive depends on how accurately we represent the temporal properties of the environment however we cannot see or touch time. As such, time in the millisecond range is both a fundamental and elusive dimension of everyday experiences. Despite the obvious importance of time to information processing and to behavior in general, little is known yet about how the human brain process time. Existing approaches to the study of the neural mechanisms of time mainly focus on the identification of brain regions involved in temporal computations (‘where’ time is processed in the brain), whereas most computational models vary in their biological plausibility and do not always make clear testable predictions. BiT is a groundbreaking research program designed to challenge current models of time perception and to offer a new perspective in the study of the neural basis of time. The groundbreaking nature of BiT derives from the novelty of the questions asked (‘when’ and ‘how’ time is processed in the brain) and from addressing them using complementary but distinct research approaches (from human neuroimaging to brain stimulation techniques, from the investigation of the whole brain to the focus on specific brain regions). By testing a new biologically plausible hypothesis of temporal representation (via duration tuning and ‘chronotopy’) and by scrutinizing the functional properties and, for the first time, the temporal hierarchies of ‘putative’ time regions, BiT will offer a multifaceted knowledge of how the human brain represents time. This new knowledge will challenge our understanding of brain organization and function that typically lacks of a time angle and will impact our understanding of how the brain uses time information for perception and action

Mots-clés : temporal cognition,interval timing,human neuroimaging,brain stimulation,psychophysics
Projet ERC : MUYA-IIIF (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
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 : 150000.0 €

Images published on the Web are currently locked up in silos because institutions use different image delivery software on their networks, one that is usually tightly coupled with their custom metadata structures. This has led to isolated data silos that prevent information to be easily reused. The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) solves this problem with a set of protocols or Application Programming Interfaces (API), for requests between computers to allow images and metadata held in different digital repositories to be accessed in a standardised format. The IIIF standard is now used by a growing number of major libraries and other institutions around the globe. However, it is not possible in IIIF to locate a particular text passage without searching the whole manuscript because there are no tools to create and search document structure (as opposed to textual annotations and commentaries, for which tools already exist). MUYA-IIIF will establish proof of concept of the idea, generated by the ERC-funded project The Multimedia Yasna (MUYA, AdG 694612, 2016–2021), to develop and implement a IIIF compliant tool for annotating textual structure (e.g. siglum, title, folio number, chapter, stanza, verse), associate the image with the structured transcription of the text it bears, and make such structure detectable within IIIF. This PoC will 1) enable “expert sourcing” via an open source platform to capture structural information in multiple manuscript witnesses; 2) represent structural information in a way that connects the intellectual structure of the object with the user’s viewing experience; 3) potentially use machine assisted segmentation in marking up the text to create structure; 4) connect the metadata, structural metadata, and TEI-XML transcripts with the images in a unified user experience; 5) use open source software built on open standards, to create a reusable seamless user experience that replaces a typically onerous process.

Mots-clés : manuscripts,digital annotation tools,iiif,software development
Projet ERC : SynDiv (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
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 : 2500000.0 €

Imagine building a living cell from basic components, a vesicle filled with biomolecules that can sustain itself and reproduce into similar offspring. Can this be done? This proposal addresses the most tantalizing aspect: synthetic cell division. We aim to build liposomes (lipid vesicles enclosing an aqueous solution with proteins and DNA) that can spontaneously divide through a contractile protein ring at the vesicle perimeter. To realize this, we employ an experimental biophysics approach that addresses both the actual division and the prerequisite spatial control, with: 1. Cells in nanofabricated shapes. We will study cell-division proteins and DNA in live E.coli bacteria that are molded into user-defined arbitrary shapes and sizes. Clarifying the effects of cell shape will elucidate the guiding principles for the spatiotemporal organization of the cell-division machinery. 2. Proteins and DNA in nanofabricated chambers. We will use a bottom up approach to study the basic divisome components in vitro exploiting the full control provided by nanochambers. This will resolve the spatial organization of the fascinating patterns of Min proteins and chromatin that dictate the localization of the division ring. 3. Liposomes on chip. We will develop a chip-based technology to generate liposomes for exploring synthetic cell division. We will use both microfluidic constrictions and a biomimetic approach (encapsulation of divisome proteins such as FtsZ) to induce autonomous liposome splitting, thus enabling a simplified but tightly controlled form of synthetic cell division. To our knowledge, this nanofabrication-based approach to synthetic division is unique. We expect to be able to make important contributions to understanding cell division, and anticipate that on a 5-year scale we indeed can master synthetic division. We believe that our mix of nanophysics and synthetic biology is bound to yield deep insight into the biophysical underpinnings of cellular reproduction.

Mots-clés : synthetic cell,microfluidics,bacterial cell division,nanofabrication,synthetic biology,biophysics,nanoscience,ftsz,min system,biomimetics,single molecule
Projet ERC : Tamed Cancer (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Semmelweis University — Pays : Hongrie — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 97975.0 €

Imagine if tumor growth would be reduced and then kept in a minimal and safe volume in an automated manner and in a personalized way, i.e. cancer drug would be injected using a continuous therapy improving the patient’s quality of life. By control engineering approaches it is possible to create model-based strategies for health problems. Artificial pancreas is an adequate example for this, where by continuous glucose measurement device and insulin pump it is possible to improve diabetes treatment. Gaining expertise from this problem, the current proposal focuses on taming the cancer by developing an engineering-based medical therapy. The interdisciplinary approach focuses on modern robust control algorithm development in order to stop the angiogenesis process (i.e. vascular system development) of the tumor; hence, to stop tumor growth, maintaining it in a minimal, “tamed” form. This breakthrough concept could revitalize cancer treatment. It is the right time to do it as some investigations regarding tumor growth modeling have been already done; now, it should be refined by model identification tools and validated on animal trials. The benefit of robust control was already demonstrated in artificial pancreas; hence, it could be adapted to cancer research. The result could end with a personalized healthcare approach for drug-delivery in cancer, improving quality of life, optimizing drug infusion and minimizing treatment costs. This interdisciplinary approach combines control engineering with mathematics, computer science and medical sciences. As a result, the model-based robust control approach envisage refining the currently existing tumor growth modeling aspects, design an optimal control algorithm and extend it by robust control theory to guarantee its general applicability. Based on our research background, validation will be done first in a manually controlled way, but then in an automatic mode to propose it for further human investigations.

Mots-clés : modern robust control,lpv model,model identification,targeted molecular therapy,antiangiogenic therapy
Projet ERC : BioPoweredCL (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

Imaging is one of the most powerful technique to visualize molecules, tissues, to understand and follow processes and it is the most used diagnostic tool in vitro and in vivo, Current biomedical imaging techniques can have high sensitivity, good spatial/temporal resolution and, in some cases, high tissue penetration but cannot combine all of these desired properties without using harmful radiations (or toxic labels) or very expensive equipment. Optical imaging techniques represent the best compromise among them; however, their ability to scale to human body is precluded. The main restriction of fluorescence imaging is that it requires light excitation which is limited by tissue absorption and scattering. Such limitations are not present in chemiluminescence imaging since light production occurs through a chemical reaction, resulting in higher penetration depth and best sensitivity. However both natural and artificial chemiluminescent systems require a continuous flow of exogenous reactants since all substrates are irreversibly consumed. BioPoweredCL aims to develop an unprecedented strategy to enable molecular imaging by realizing near infrared luminophores that harvest energy from the cellular respiration chain, in order to emit light without being consumed themselves. BioPoweredCL takes advantage of the most recent progress in artificial light production to develop a novel imaging technique where the absence of an excitation source overcomes the current limitations of fluorescence imaging while the regeneration of the luminophore overcomes the limitations of bioluminescence imaging. If successful it could replace current techniques based on harmful ionizing radiations such as X-rays or γ-rays. To reach such a grand-challenge the work plan is articulated into three different phases: 1) synthesis of new luminophores; 2) electrochemical characterization and energy cell harvesting; 3) in vitro experiments where the full potential of the approach will be validated.

Mots-clés : chemiluminescence,bioluminescence,electrochemiluminescence,luminescence,thermally activated delayed fluorescence,bioimaging,self assembly,luminescent compounds,sensing
Projet ERC : O-NEAT (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cellular, Developmental and Regenerative Biology
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 : 150000.0 €

Imaging methods enabling the acquisition of millions of cell contours have opened the path for improved understanding of development, repair, homeostasis and pathology. The full potential of such imaging methods can only be reached when robust, cost-effective and user-friendly methods are democratized to extract important information from the huge amounts of data generated. Our project aims to implement a disruptive deep-learning based technology, O-NEAT, that uses these masses of data for training neural networks to automatically and reproducibly explore tissue dynamics. This would enable researchers in academia and the private sector to quickly and reliably extract information regarding cell dynamics in normal or pathological conditions thus having significant potential market applications.

Mots-clés : live imaging,image analysis,software,deep learning,artificial intelligence microscopy
Projet ERC : InCell (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999925.0 €

Imaging the inside of living cells with single nanometre resolution has been a long-standing dream in bio-microscopy. Direct observation of changes to molecular networks inside of living cells would revolutionize the way we study structural cell biology. Unfortunately, no such tool exists. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is the closest we have, to nanoscale functional imaging of cells in their native, fluid environment. However, it is limited to imaging the outside of the cell. With InCell, I will remedy this by developing an AFM capable of imaging the inside of living cells. The approach is based on a microfabricated high speed AFM cantilever encased in a double barrel patch-clamp shell. The patch clamp shell seals onto the plasma membrane of the cell, so that the tip of the AFM cantilever can enter the cell without causing the cytosol to leak out. Parasitic interactions of the AFM tip with the cytosol will be subtracted from the cantilever deflection signal, using high speed photo-thermal off-resonance tapping (PT-ORT), a novel AFM mode we have recently developed in my lab. This allows the extraction of the true tip-sample interaction, even in viscous fluids. A dedicated InCell HS-AFM combined with confocal optical microscopy will be used to guide the InCell cantilever inside the cell to the area of interest. Using this minimally invasive technique we will study the formation of clathrin coated pits, a crucial part of endocytosis. By imaging for the first time the nanoscale dynamics of this process in living cells, we aim to answer fundamental questions about the clathrin coat assembly. We will characterize the kinetics, stability and force generation by the clathrin lattice. This will be the first example of how enabling nanoscale imaging inside living cells will be a game changer in cell biology. It will open up a myriad of possibilities for the study of vesicular transport, viral and bacterial infection, nuclear pore transport, cell signalling and many more.

Mots-clés : high speed atomic force microscopy,live cell imaging,microfabrication,cantilever,endocytosis,clathrin coated pits,mechatronics