Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : UnLost (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MiBACT
Type d'entité : Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 425668.75 €

The loss of something precious triggers an immediate instinct to find it. But what if the quest does not end there? We see it and find it, yet the precious object is irreparably damaged, and its true knowledge is locked away behind its damage, frustratingly denying us access to the information it holds. In such cases, the object essentially remains lost. Each day, in fact, treasured relics bearing unique witness to the human experience are lost to decay and damage due to the elements of the environment, the ravages of time, and the hands of war. And while we rejoice at every inspiring, arduous discovery and recovery of a physical object, we often must acknowledge that much of the knowledge it contains remains lost. UnLost will revolutionise the way we study damaged, complex heritage materials by capitalising upon today’s vast scientific capabilities. UnLost will harness these capabilities to capture immense amounts of disparate data and combine them with a novel, much-needed systematic and rigorous process to extract, integrate, study, archive, and protect multi-modal data so that lost knowledge is rendered – and kept – UnLost. The Herculaneum papyrus scrolls, buried and carbonised by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE and then excavated in the 18th century, represent the epitome of such found, yet still lost, heritage. The only complete Classical library from the ancient world to have survived and been found in situ, much of the textual material contained in this renowned collection remains hidden within its profoundly damaged and fragmented form. The goal of the UnLost team is to create and deploy new methods of digitization, AI-inspired inference, and archival-quality complex digital objects so as to revive what has been lost from Herculaneum and develop new benchmark approaches for the restoration of damaged heritage objects as a whole.

Mots-clés : digital restoration,herculaneum papyri,material analysis,physical conservation,born digital editions,virtual unwrapping,ancient scrolls,hidden papyrus layers,structured data and metadata
Projet ERC : TalkingPhages (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2703921.0 €

Communication between organisms is one of the most sophisticated forms of social interactions. It has been recently discovered that bacterial viruses (phages) show multiple social attributes including the ability to communicate extracellularly with their progenies through a peptide-based system called arbitrium. This system is utilized by phages to guide life-cycle decisions, such as the transitions between their quiescence and virulence states. It has subsequently become clear that this system is not exclusive to phages but is also present in other mobile genetic elements (MGEs) and that its underlying design and function has diversified considerably. Despite the wide-ranging impact of these discoveries, the molecular basis of these new systems of communication, and their function in different MGEs, remain to be deciphered. More importantly, although it has been proposed that phages only communicate with their progeny, our preliminary results indicate that the arbitrium system can be used by phages and other elements to communicate with unrelated MGEs, sometimes present in different bacterial species. However, the prevalence and ecological role of this unprecedented inter-MGE communication is unclear. In the TalkingPhages project, we’ll explore all these questions and establish the molecular basis used by arbitrium systems to shape MGE diversity, interactions amongst MGEs and bacterial ecology and evolution. Our team combines expertise in MGEs and communication systems using tools from genetics (Penadés), biochemistry (Marina) and eco-evolutionary dynamics (Eldar). By exposing the multi-layered network of communications between MGEs, which is amenable for exploration on multiple levels of resolution, this project would set a milestone in understanding the complex eco-evolutionary dynamics of MGEs and the relevance of their sociality, with potential impact on our understanding of virulence and resistance in clinically and agriculturally important bacterial species.

Mots-clés : bacteria,phages,mobile genetic elements,quorum sensing,communication,evolution,ecology,molecular biology,bacillus,arbitrium,cooperation
Projet ERC : CeLEARN (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université Pompeu Fabra — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UPF
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 5138107.0 €

Cells continuously sense and interpret the external signals coming from their time-varying environments to generate context-dependent responses. This is true for the entire tree of life, ranging from bacteria and unicellular eukaryotes to neurons forming networks in the developing brain. Identifying the fundamental principles and underlying mechanisms that enable cells to interpret their complex natural surroundings and adequately respond remains one of the fundamental questions in biology. Conceptual views so far have been mainly guided by molecular biology descriptions, suggesting that cells are controlled by a genomic program executing a pre-scripted plan. Our goal is to develop an alternative conceptual framework: cells generate internal representations of their external ‘world’, which they utilise to actively infer information about it and predict changes, in order to determine their response. We will formalise this concept in a theory of single-cell learning, by combining information theory concepts to quantify the predictive information from the internal cell representations, with dynamical systems theory to explain how these encodings are realised. We will interrogate experimentally systems across all scales of biological organization: bacteria (B. subtilis), single-cell organisms (Paramecium, Tetrahymena) and neuronal cell culture models. By studying them in a comparative manner, we aim at identifying generic molecular mechanisms through which single-cell learning is realised. The acquired understanding will enable us to address in vivo how single neurons during D. melanogaster development learn to form, stabilize or eliminate axonal branches, to generate stereotyped synaptic patterning under highly-variable conditions. We argue that providing a broader and generic definition of learning will serve as a unifying framework, linking disparate areas and scales of biology, and offering a basis for addressing fundamental biological questions.

Mots-clés : cell learning and memory,information theory,synaptic targeting,recurrent networks,transient dynamics,aneural systems
Projet ERC : NEMESIS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université Pompeu Fabra — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UPF
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1743350.0 €

Focal brain disorders, including stroke, trauma, and epilepsy, are the main causes of disability and loss of productivity in the world, and carry a cumulative cost in Europe of about 500 billion euro/year. Now, physicians diagnose and treat these conditions as if they were caused by local dysfunction due to the pathological process. However, there is growing evidence that, in most neurological and psychiatric disorders, clinical symptoms reflect widespread network abnormalities. Normalization of such network abnormalities through “circuit-based” stimulation would therefore improve function. However, this form of therapy is currently limited by numerous factors: lack of knowledge about the underlying mechanisms and their behavioural relevance; inability to map these abnormalities onto single patients; and, most importantly, a principled understanding of where and how to stimulate the brain to produce functional recovery. ‘NEMESIS’, from Ancient Greek as “give what is due”, aims to “give an injured brain what is missing”, i.e., restore through stimulation normal activity in dysfunctional brain circuitries. By synergizing people, concepts, and technologies, NEMESIS will first characterize the effects of focal injury at multiple spatial and temporal scales (from whole brain to local circuits). Through the combination of observational (e.g., fMRI, EEG, calcium imaging, LFPs) and causal methods (e.g., electro-magnetic stimulation, optogenetics) NEMESIS will test the hypothesis that disconnected networks lie in a “sleep-like state” that impairs communication. Thirdly, NEMESIS will create whole brain models of structure/function to predict the effect of individual lesions and simulate novel stimulation protocols aimed at “re-awakening” the disconnected brain. Finally, proof-of-concept interventions that combine circuit-based stimulation and behavioural training, guided by modelling and animal studies, will be tested to restore normal activity, and so give back what is due.

Mots-clés : focal injury,brain networks,brain rhythms,sleep,slow wave oscillations,whole brain computational models,brain stimulation,brain connectivity,fmri,eeg,lfp,calcium imaging,tms,7t mri
Projet ERC : UnLost (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : University of Kentucky — Pays : Etats-Unis — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UK
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3979631.25 €

The loss of something precious triggers an immediate instinct to find it. But what if the quest does not end there? We see it and find it, yet the precious object is irreparably damaged, and its true knowledge is locked away behind its damage, frustratingly denying us access to the information it holds. In such cases, the object essentially remains lost. Each day, in fact, treasured relics bearing unique witness to the human experience are lost to decay and damage due to the elements of the environment, the ravages of time, and the hands of war. And while we rejoice at every inspiring, arduous discovery and recovery of a physical object, we often must acknowledge that much of the knowledge it contains remains lost. UnLost will revolutionise the way we study damaged, complex heritage materials by capitalising upon today’s vast scientific capabilities. UnLost will harness these capabilities to capture immense amounts of disparate data and combine them with a novel, much-needed systematic and rigorous process to extract, integrate, study, archive, and protect multi-modal data so that lost knowledge is rendered – and kept – UnLost. The Herculaneum papyrus scrolls, buried and carbonised by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE and then excavated in the 18th century, represent the epitome of such found, yet still lost, heritage. The only complete Classical library from the ancient world to have survived and been found in situ, much of the textual material contained in this renowned collection remains hidden within its profoundly damaged and fragmented form. The goal of the UnLost team is to create and deploy new methods of digitization, AI-inspired inference, and archival-quality complex digital objects so as to revive what has been lost from Herculaneum and develop new benchmark approaches for the restoration of damaged heritage objects as a whole.

Mots-clés : digital restoration,herculaneum papyri,material analysis,physical conservation,born digital editions,virtual unwrapping,ancient scrolls,hidden papyrus layers,structured data and metadata
Projet ERC : 4D-STAR (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Dartmouth College — Pays : Etats-Unis — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2563645.0 €

Stars are the source of radiation, chemistry, and life in the Universe. Models of how stars live are key ingredients in planetary, astrophysical, and cosmological research. A star is a hot plasma rotating around an axis. Small stars like the Sun rotate slowly but bigger ones with more mass rotate faster, shaping them as flattened spheroids. Yet, current stellar models simplify the flattening or treat stars as spheres during their lives, using 1 spatial and 1 time dimension (1+1D). Rotation and magnetism induce transport processes in 3 spatial dimensions, which change over time, requiring a 3+1D treatment. Current age-dating of stars is done from 1+1D models, with uncertainties up to 1000%. Accurate ages of stars are the dominant missing ingredient to understand stellar and planetary evolution, the emergence of life, and the chemistry in our Universe. 4D-STAR will answer the fundamental question of how rotating spheroids evolve in time and build up their chemistry during their lives. We will develop a new 3+1D theory of stellar rotation for flattened spheroids evolving over millions to billions of years, from birth to death. Lifting stellar models to 3+1D can only be done now, using asteroseismic data of thousands of stars in all life phases. Such data reveal nonradial oscillations, or starquakes, allowing us to infer internal stellar rotation, magnetism, chemistry, and the ages of stars with 10% accuracy. 4D-STAR will provide open-source modules to compute the evolution of rotating magnetic stars in 3+1D, calibrated to asteroseismic observables of single stars and stars in binaries and clusters. 4D-STAR brings a paradigm shift based on mathematical modelling, astrophysics, and computational science. Its breadth, challenges, and goals require a transdisciplinary integration of four teams led by an asteroseismologist, a theoretician specialised in transport, a hydrodynamicist, and a stellar evolution software developer, each with proven track records.

Mots-clés : stellar evolution,stellar structure,asteroseismology,scientific software development,high performance computing,differential algebraic equations
Projet ERC : GlycanSwitch (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation en Santé de l’Université de Porto — Pays : Portugal — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : i3S
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Autoimmune diseases including rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are often life-threatening disorders with increasing disability having a negative impact on patients’ quality of life. Mechanisms leading to the breach of tolerance in development of autoimmunity are still largely unknown. Protein glycosylation is an essential regulatory mechanism in the immune system. We recently demonstrated that N-glycosylation of the variable region (Fab) of autoantibodies is a hallmark of RA development and progression. We also demonstrated that autoantibodies acquire these Fab glycosylation signatures already many years before disease onset. We herein hypothesize that Fab glycosylation at the level of the B cell receptor is a key molecular switch promoting the selection, activation and proliferation of autoreactive B cells leading to the concomitant breach of immunotolerance. Within GlycanSwitch, we will map the Fab glycome of various types of RA autoantibodies and autoreactive B cells. We will study the factors and underlying cellular mechanisms that regulate Fab glycosylation of B cell receptors and autoantibodies. We will investigate the immunological effects of Fab glycosylation and the impact in B cells signalling and activation in the context of molecular and cellular interacting partners in the immune microenvironment. Finally, we will test in relevant mouse models how Fab glycosylation of autoantibodies and autoreactive B cells contributes to the breach of tolerance. We expect that the obtained insights into the role of glycans as key checkpoint for the selection of autoreactive B cells and the rise of autoimmunity will provide leads for targeted therapeutic interventions as well as rationales for the early detection of RA and autoimmune diseases in general. We foresee that the knowledge generated will allow us to embark on a targeted prevention clinical study in patients at risk for RA to turn off the GlycanSwitch leading to chronic RA.

Mots-clés : autoimmunity,tolerance
Projet ERC : HYDROSENSING (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université norvégienne de sciences et de technologie — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2435262.0 €

Water stress is an increasing probleWater stress is an increasing problem for global agriculture given the impact of climate change. Despite the fundamental importance of water, exactly how plants sense its availability remains unknown. This new knowledge is vital for designing more climate resilient crops, yet currently remains a critical gap in scientific understanding. Our unique synergy is ideal to take on this ambitious project and discover how plants sense water after identifying membrane proteins from a proof-of-principle multi-targeted genetic screen designed to reveal components of the water-sensing (hydrosensing) machinery. We hypothesise changes in plant hydraulic fluxes driven by transient water stress are sensed by a specialised cell type – termed phloem companion cells - that controls the synthesis and release of the abiotic stress signal ABA. Release of ABA by water stress is triggered by perturbations in plasma membrane-cell wall contact sensed by kinases like THESEUS1 (THE1) and additional missing components, which we will identify using our custom multi-targeted CIRSPR libraries. Our discoveries will unlock the mechanism enabling sensing of the most important molecule on the planet, WATER, in the most abundant lifeform biomass-wise, PLANTS.  Solving how plants sense water demands a highly inter-disciplinary strategy that goes beyond the cutting edge by pioneering the development of innovative genome editing, functional imaging and structural biology approaches. The breadth and depth of capabilities and expertise to undertake this strategy necessitates a synergistic partnership between world-leading groups to go beyond the current state of the art. By pursuing this high-risk/high-gain strategy, our project promises to reveal common ‘design principles’ that underpin the core mechanism(s) for water stress signalling in plants. This new knowledge is crucial for international efforts to design climate-resilient crops and underpin global food security.

Mots-clés : plant molecular genomics plant phenomics water stress
Projet ERC : nilomorph (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Surrey — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : CO-PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3885963.5 €

NILOMORPH sets out to explain how linguistic evolution took a highly unexpected turn in one family of languages spoken in East Africa. They have evolved a morphological system where multiple grammatical categories are expressed simultaneously within a single syllable, through subtle modulations of its phonological properties. For example, in the Dinka language the word tèm, meaning ‘to cut’, can be made to mean ‘she cuts it for someone’ by lengthening the vowel, changing the low tone to high, and pronouncing it with breathy voice quality: té̤ːm, and more than dozen other contrasts can be generated by similar means. A sin-gle monosyllabic word in language like Dinka attains a degree of information density unparalleled else-where in the languages of the world. Surprisingly, comparative evidence suggests that the West Nilotic lan-guages were once much more conventional, using suffixes to mark grammatical categories. As has hap-pened in many other languages, such as English, these suffixes were lost over time. But rather than simply disappearing, they were transformed into suprasegmental phonological properties pronounced concurrently with the word stem. The aim of NILOMORPH is to reconstruct this evolution. But because of the extreme rarity of this morphological type, we need to explain not just how it happened here, we also have to explain why it did not happen in other language families. It is therefore not enough just to retrace the history of linguistic forms. NILOMORPH proposes a transformative step in historical linguistics: the reconstruction not just of external features, but of the cognitive motivation behind them. This will be achieved through the synergy of three teams, DESCRIPTION, MORPHOLOGY and RECONSTRUCTION, employing a combination of field linguistics, acoustic analysis, experimental linguistics, computational simulation, typology, and the historical-comparative method.

Mots-clés : linguistic morphology,inflection,phonology,nilo saharan languages,africa,language documentation,agent based modelling,artificial language experiments,linguistic reconstruction,digital humanities
Projet ERC : HYDROSENSING (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Nottingham — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2991947.0 €

Water stress is an increasing probleWater stress is an increasing problem for global agriculture given the impact of climate change. Despite the fundamental importance of water, exactly how plants sense its availability remains unknown. This new knowledge is vital for designing more climate resilient crops, yet currently remains a critical gap in scientific understanding. Our unique synergy is ideal to take on this ambitious project and discover how plants sense water after identifying membrane proteins from a proof-of-principle multi-targeted genetic screen designed to reveal components of the water-sensing (hydrosensing) machinery. We hypothesise changes in plant hydraulic fluxes driven by transient water stress are sensed by a specialised cell type – termed phloem companion cells - that controls the synthesis and release of the abiotic stress signal ABA. Release of ABA by water stress is triggered by perturbations in plasma membrane-cell wall contact sensed by kinases like THESEUS1 (THE1) and additional missing components, which we will identify using our custom multi-targeted CIRSPR libraries. Our discoveries will unlock the mechanism enabling sensing of the most important molecule on the planet, WATER, in the most abundant lifeform biomass-wise, PLANTS.  Solving how plants sense water demands a highly inter-disciplinary strategy that goes beyond the cutting edge by pioneering the development of innovative genome editing, functional imaging and structural biology approaches. The breadth and depth of capabilities and expertise to undertake this strategy necessitates a synergistic partnership between world-leading groups to go beyond the current state of the art. By pursuing this high-risk/high-gain strategy, our project promises to reveal common ‘design principles’ that underpin the core mechanism(s) for water stress signalling in plants. This new knowledge is crucial for international efforts to design climate-resilient crops and underpin global food security.

Mots-clés : plant molecular genomics plant phenomics water stress