Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : GRAVIBONE (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : Muséum national d'histoire naturelle — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : MNHN
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 174140.0 €

Heavy animals, said to be graviportal, are under strong mechanical constraints. Their skeleton, notably their limb bones, show convergent morpho-functional adaptations that surprisingly remain very poorly studied. Understanding the convergent and specific adaptations of bone to weight bearing in taxa with various morphologies, sizes, habitats and locomotor behaviours is essential to understand how bone responds to biomechanical constraints. In palaeontology, it will allow determining how giant fossil animals could move and support their weight. The study of graviportality provides an ideal case-study to analyse form-function relationship in a macro-evolutionary context. GRAVIBONE proposes a broad and modern comparative investigation of the biomechanical adaptations of the outer and inner bone anatomy of long bones observable in different modern and fossil taxa that have converged on graviportality. It combines various approaches using recently developed powerful methods and tools (notably the innovative integration of the whole 3D external and internal bone anatomy in biomechanical modelling) and uses these in an explicit phylogenetic context. Characterizing the various adaptive traits observed in extant taxa and understanding the link between specific isolated microanatomical, morphological and mechanical parameters will enable to: a) define degrees/types of adaptations to graviportality, b) make palaeoecological and paleofunctional inferences, and c) explain adaptations to graviportality in amniote evolutionary history. This new and highly integrative approach will increase our knowledge on the adaptation of the vertebrate skeleton and thereby of the organisms, to environmental demands.

Mots-clés : functional anatomy,bone adaptation
Projet ERC : HemTree2.0 (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems
Entité participante : Weizmann Institute of Science — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Hematopoiesis is an important model for stem cell differentiation with great medical significance. Heterogeneity within hematopoietic progenitor populations has considerably limited characterization and molecular understanding of lineage commitment in both health and disease. Advances in single-cell genomic technologies provide an extraordinary opportunity for unbiased and high resolution mapping of biological function and regulation. Recently we have developed an experimental and analytical method, termed massively parallel single-cell RNA-Seq (MARS-Seq), for unbiased classification of individual cells from their native context and successfully applied it for characterization of immune and hematopoietic progenitors. Here, we propose to uncover the hierarchy and regulatory mechanisms controlling hematopoiesis by combining comprehensive single-cell RNA-Seq analyses, modelling approaches, advanced functional assays, single-cell CRISPR screens, knockout models and epigenetic profiling. Exciting preliminary result show that indeed our approach is starting to uncover the complexity of hematopoietic progenitors and the regulatory circuits driving hematopoietic decisions. We will pursue the following aims: (i) Generate a refined model of hematopoiesis by comprehensive single-cell RNA-Seq profiling of hematopoietic progenitors, (ii) validate the predicted model by in vivo functional developmental assays and then (iii) test candidate transcription and chromatin factors uncovered by our model for their role in controlling progression towards various lineages using single-cell measurements combined with CRISPR screens. Together, our study is expected to generate a revised and high-resolution hematopoietic model and decipher the regulatory networks that control hematopoiesis. Our methods and models may provide a platform for future medical advancements including a large-scale European collaborative project to discover a comprehensive human hematopoietic tree.

Mots-clés : hematopoiesis,single cell genomics
Projet ERC : StemBAT (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : University of Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. Cambridge
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 517869.24 €

Here we propose a strategy to control body weight and prevent/reverse obesity based on targeting brown adipose tissue (BAT) to facilitate negative energy balance and prevent adaptive responses to dietary restriction. However, BAT in humans is limited and poorly characterised. Thus, we propose to use stem cells as a tool to gain unique insights into the biology of human brown adipocytes. The General Objective is to identify pathways and factors of potential therapeutic relevance that promote BAT development and/or activation/recruitment using a stem cell based BAT differentiation approach, and then to functionally validate the role of these factors in vitro by genome engineering human stem cell derived adipocytes and in vivo by transplanting these cells into mice. Specific Aims are: 1.To identify molecular mechanisms involved in human brown adipose tissue development and activation. 2. To investigate the molecular mechanisms involved in human white adipose tissue browning/beige cells recruitment 3. To identify new agents/compounds of therapeutic value, able to activate or recruit human brown adipose tissue/brite cells. Experimental strategy: We will use a UCP1-reporter human pluripotent stem cell (PSC) line differentiated into brown and white adipocytes to identify genetic factors that may contribute to brown adipocyte differentiation/activation and white adipocyte browning. Following the identification of candidate genes, we will knock out, constitutively and/or inducibly, both alleles of these genes in human PSC cells, producing a total loss of function. Following the in vitro phenotyping of the cells we will proceed to the in vivo validation of the functional properties/phenotype of human PSC derived brown/brite adipocytes (wild-type and loss of function) by transplanting these cells into mice. Using these reporter tools we will also perform in vitro pharmacological screening and in vivo validation of new compounds that stimulate BAT activation and WAT browning

Mots-clés : brown fat,thermogenesis,obesity
Projet ERC : VALURED (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : University of Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 345216.51 €

Heterogeneity and diversity are a pervasive aspect of modern societies. Differences in individuals’ preferences, needs, skills, and information are key to explain variation in individuals’ behavior and to anticipate individuals’ responses to policy changes. There is no consensus, however, about how to take these differences into account when evaluating policies. Project VALURED will reexamine this ethical challenge by characterizing the mapping between value judgments—i.e. principles of distributive justice—and redistribution policies. This mapping is tremendously important for welfare analysis and policy design. First, it associates the most desirable policy to each set of value judgments, providing an “ethical menu” to policy design. Second, it gives an ethical identity of each policy proposal, that is, it identifies the value judgments a policymaker endorses when proposing a specific policy. The main objectives of VALURED are to: 1) identify transparent and compelling value judgments that accommodate heterogeneity and diversity; 2) show the implications of these value judgments for the evaluation and design of redistribution policies; 3) characterize welfare criteria that respect individuals’ preferences and account for individuals’ differences in needs, skills, and information; 4) provide new insights for the design of income, capital, and inheritance taxation; 5) develop simple formulas that express optimal policies as a function of observable heterogeneity and ethical parameters. Project VALURED combines welfare economics with public economics. The first part deals with income taxation and addresses the ethical challenges related to individuals’ heterogeneity in preferences, needs, and skills. The second part focuses on capital taxation and addresses individuals’ differences in risk preferences and information. The third part analyses the design of inheritance taxation and addresses the social concerns for intergenerational and intragenerational equity.
Projet ERC : HETEROPOLITICS (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Organosi gia tin erevna tin tekmiriosi kai tin proothisi ton omotimon praktikon — Pays : Grèce — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : P2p lab
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 5000.0 €

Heteropolitics is a project in contemporary political theory which purports to contribute to the renewal of political thought on the ‘common’ (communities and the commons) and the political in tandem. The common implies a variable interaction between differences which communicate and collaborate in and through their differences, converging partially on practices and particular pursuits. The political pertains to processes through which plural communities manage themselves in ways which enable mutual challenges, deliberation, and creative agency. Since the dawn of the 21st century, a growing interest in rethinking and reconfiguring community has spread among theorists, citizens and social movements (see e.g. Esposito 2013; Dardot & Laval 2014; Amin & Roberts 2008). This has been triggered by a complex tangle of social, economic and political conditions. Climate change, economic crises, globalization, increasing migration flows and the malaise of liberal democracies loom large among them. These issues are essentially political. Rethinking and refiguring communities goes hand in hand thus with rethinking and reinventing politics. Hence ‘hetero-politics’, the quest for another politics, which can establish bonds of commonality across differences and can enable action in common without re-enacting the closures of ‘organic’ community or the violence of transformative politics in the past. Heteropolitics will seek to break new ground by combining an extended re-elaboration of contemporary political theory with a more empirically grounded research into alternative and incipient practices of community building and self-governance in: education; the social economy; art; new modes of civic engagement by young people; new platforms of citizens’ participation in municipal politics; network communities, and other social fields (Relevant cases include Sardex, a community currency in Sardinia; Barcelona en Comú, a citizens’ platform governing the city of Barcelona, etc.)

Mots-clés : community,commons,the political,infrapolitics,heteropolitics
Projet ERC : NeXource (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Strathclyde — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 525643.75 €

High-quality electron beams are required for advanced light sources and for high energy physics. Engines of discovery such as free-electron-lasers (FELs) and other bright light sources, are driven by electron beams today produced in km-long state-of-the-art linear accelerators (linacs). A complementary alternative are cm-scale plasma-based accelerators, which are feasible in university-lab scale environments. The NeXource project aims at combining key advantages of both types of accelerators to realize hybrid plasma-based accelerators orders of magnitude smaller and at the same time with electron beam quality orders of magnitude better than state-of-the-art. This has far-reaching impact as it will enable the construction of table-top coherent hard x-ray sources with extreme brightness. This project is motivated by experimental breakthroughs obtained in the E210 collaboration at the linac-driven plasma accelerator facility FACET at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and by the progress at laser-plasma-accelerator facilities, combined with novel conceptual approaches towards beams with unprecedented 6D-brightness by using tailored beamloading in plasma-based photocathodes. A dedicated setup for plasma photocathode prototyping and hybrid plasma acceleration will be established at the Scottish Centre for the Application of Plasma-based Accelerators (SCAPA) to develop beam brightness transformers. This R&D will be complemented by campaigns at SLAC, DESY, Daresbury Laboratory and laser-plasma-accelerator labs in Europe. Start-to-end simulations indicate that hard x-ray FEL’s with ultrahigh gain and other advanced light sources can be realised with such electron beams in university-scale labs, which would have transformative impact on photon science and a wide range of natural, life and material science.

Mots-clés : plasma wakefield acceleration,light source,x ray free electron laser,laser plasma interaction
Projet ERC : ReSuNiCo (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : University of Bremen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2361130.0 €

Highly pure, binary and ternaty metal sulphides/nitrides are increasingly important materials for energy storage, electrocatalysis, optoelectronics and battery materials. To fully use their potential, radical new technologies that allow the synthesis of complex, and multicomponent crystalline materials with specific size and morphology are required. While the reactive spray technology is already a key element for the scalable and economic synthesis of metal oxides, we will fundamentally advance the strength of the reactive spray processes by generating a knowledge-base for sulphide/nitride materials through our ReSuNiCo project. We will achieve this goal with a fast, safe, versatile, time and resource efficient high throughput single droplet combustion screening that identifies complete new reaction schemes and processes as we highlighted in Nature news. The method is highly flexible and adaptable to a large variety of reactive liquids and gas atmospheres that readily comply with the safety requirements via small volumes, small liquid streams and gas flows. We will establish in-situ process diagnostics in order to identify droplet reactions, particle formation pathways and product characteristics. We will use this knowledge to build standard and inverted (fuels and sulfidizers/nitridizers are exchanged in the reactive spray) lab-scale reactors that serve as demonstrators to transfer the first material samples into performance evaluations in specific applications. The objectives and work packages of ReSuNiCo reach far beyond the state of the art materials synthesis exploration and calls for new process innovations in reactive spraying technologies, aerosol and gas phase characterizations, process model formulations and particle synthesis. The implemented know-how in in-situ high surface area coatings on electrodes/substrates offers unique opportunities to take the existing knowledge to the next level.

Mots-clés : process engineering,reactive spray,high throughput combustion screening,metal sulfides,nitrides,thin,thick films,electrodes
Projet ERC : DemandDemoc (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Hong Kong University of Science and Technology — Pays : Hong Kong — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : HKUST
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 555000.0 €

Historically, people around the world have demanded democratic institutions. Such democratic movements propel political change and also determine economic outcomes. In this project, we ask, how do political preferences, beliefs, and second-order beliefs shape the strategic decision to participate in a movement demanding democracy? Existing scholarship is unsatisfactory because it is conducted ex post: preferences, beliefs, and behavior have converged to a new equilibrium. In contrast, we examine a democratic movement in real time, studying the ongoing democracy movement in Hong Kong. Our study is composed of four parts. In Part 1, we collect panel survey data from Hong Kong university students, a particularly politically active subpopulation. We collect data on preferences, behavior, beliefs, and second-order beliefs using incentivized and indirect elicitation to encourage truthful reporting. We analyze the associations among these variables to shed light on the drivers of participation in the democracy movement. In Part 2, we exploit experimental variation in the provision of information to study political coordination. Among participants in the panel survey, we provide information regarding the preferences and beliefs of other students. We examine whether exposure to information regarding peers causes students to update their beliefs and change their behavior. In Part 3, we extend the analysis in Part 1 to a nationally representative sample of Hong Kong citizens. To do so, we have added a module regarding political preferences, beliefs, and behavior (including incentivized questions and questions providing cover for responses to politically sensitive topics) to the HKPSSD panel survey. In Part 4, we study preferences for redistribution – plausibly a central driver for demands for political rights – among Hong Kong citizens and mainland Chinese. We examine how these preferences differ across populations, as well as their link to support for democracy.

Mots-clés : economic models of democratization,preferences for redistribution,political participation
Projet ERC : Holo-GT (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Holostem terapie avanzate srl — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : Holostem
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 125000.0 €

Holo-GT will define innovative ex vivo gene therapy of dominant genetic skin disease, by using Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) as a model system. EB is a group of dominantly or recessively inherited, devastating, incurable diseases marked by structural fragility of the integuments. The applicant has shown that combined ex vivo cell and gene therapy can cure the skin of recessive LAMB3-Junctional EB. This lifesaving procedure unveiled that the human epidermis is sustained solely by long-lived stem cells, detected as holoclone-forming cells, which generate transient progenitors referred to as meroclones and paraclones. However, over 50% of EB are dominantly inherited, making gene addition unsuitable. Gene editing does not efficiently correct epidermal stem cells, which define a small proportion of clonogenic keratinocytes and cannot be prospectively isolated. Holo-GT aims at designing a safe and efficacious protocol for dominant forms of EB through: • Molecular characterization of the keratinocyte clonal types and pathways sustaining holoclone-forming cells by single-cell RNA profiling. • Generation of induced holoclone-forming cells (iHolo) by transient expression of specific sets of transcription factors (identified in aim 1) able to reprogram progenitors into holoclone-forming cells. • Development of custom-engineered CRISPR/Cas nucleases, based on selection-based directed evolution or structure-guided mutagenesis, able to fully distinguish wild type and mutant alleles. • Using this newly developed CRISPR/Cas system, gene editing of iHolo prepared from keratinocyte cultures initiated from patients with dominant forms of EB. Holo-GT could tackle not only dominant EBs but also other dominant genetic diseases of the epidermis and other squamous epithelia, as well as recessive forms of EB, particularly those characterized by the well-known depletion of stem cells, which could be rescued by the reprogramming of transient progenitors into holoclone-forming cells (iHolo).

Mots-clés : epidermal stem cells,regenerative medicine,cell therapy,gene therapy,gene editing,genetic skin diseases,epidermolysis bullosa
Projet ERC : ShuttleCat (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
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 : 1434250.0 €

Homogeneous catalysis is one of the pillars of modern chemical synthesis because it enables the sustainable preparation of molecules that find applications in medicinal chemistry, agrochemistry, and materials science. However, many catalytic reactions use hazardous reagents, are unpractical on laboratory-scale or limited in scope. Moreover, while a relatively broad set of catalytic reactions are available to construct chemical bonds, methods to cleave those, which could find applications in biomass and waste valorization, are rare. Inspired by the synthetic power of other metal-catalyzed reversible reactions, such as transfer hydrogenation and alkene metathesis, I herein describe a groundbreaking approach to homogeneous catalysis that makes use of a novel paradigm called “shuttle catalysis”, defined as the catalytic reversible transfer of chemical moieties between two molecules, to construct and deconstruct organic compounds. The first part of the proposal describes the invention of reversible catalytic functionalization reactions of alkenes following this principle. The second part addresses the challenge of developing safer catalytic carbonylation and decarbonylation reactions that do not use nor release toxic carbon monoxide gas. Finally, the last part proposes to apply the shuttle catalysis concept to the invention of unprecedented C–X (X = P, O, S, N) bond metathesis reactions. This new approach to catalysis has the potential to revolutionize the preparation, and streamline the discovery, of numerous important molecules with applications across the molecular sciences. Importantly, in order to mitigate the high risks inherent to such a groundbreaking approach, we have collected preliminary results to demonstrate the feasibility of each of the proposed subprojects.