Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CTCFStableGenome (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems
Entité participante : German Cancer Research Center — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : DKFZ
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2488251.0 €

. Genome stability is one of the most important features in maintaining tissue homeostasis throughout the human lifespan. The research presented here will dissect how the insulator protein CCCTC-binding factor (CTCF), a ubiquitous 11 zinc finger transcription factor, controls the stability of the mammalian genome during ageing. . In Aim 1, we will elucidate how CTCF and tissue-specific master regulators maintain the functional stability of the genome during healthy ageing by developing a novel protocol to map simultaneously transcription and open chromatin in isolated hepatocyte nuclei. Using this protocol, we will explore how CTCF binding stabilizes cellular homeostasis during ageing by knocking down CTCF in vivo, both in isolation and simultaneously with knock down of liver-specific master regulators. . In Aim 2, we will reveal the molecular mechanisms underlying CTCF binding sites as susceptibility loci for somatic mutations. We will profile the mutations in open chromatin of single nuclei immediately following acute exposure to a chemical mutagen; comparing how the pattern of mutations in CTCF bound regions changes across an allelic series of CTCF knockdown mice will reveal how CTCF binding shapes the stability of the genome towards mutations. . These integrated strategies develop and deploy powerful, cutting-edge experimental approaches to reveal novel aspects of how CTCF binding stabilises the mammalian genome during healthy ageing as well as during mutagenesis.

Mots-clés : ageing,evolution,insulator,transcription,epigenetics,genome regulation,mutagenesis,regulatory networks
Projet ERC : PHOSFUN (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : National Research Council — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNR
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1995554.0 €

2D materials have attracted a great deal of interest due to their variety of applications. Since its discovery in 2004, graphene has monopolized the attention given the unparalleled combination of outperforming structural and functional properties which pave the way for a plethora of different applications. Though its applicability in micro- and nanoelectronic has been later demonstrated to be strongly limited due to its inherent lack of a band gap. This limitation could be overcome using phosphorene, a recently discovered 2D sheet formed by phosphorus atoms prepared by exfoliation of black phosphorus and endowed with a natural band gap. Up to now, only theoretical and basic research has been carried out without the demonstration of reliable and reproducible implementation into real electronic devices. The PHOSFUN proposal focuses the unexplored chemical reactivity of phosphorene and gathers together chemists mastering the chemistry of phosphorus with physicists expert in advanced nanostructured systems. First, we aim to set-up a scalable and reproducible synthesis of mono and multilayer phosphorene. Then the functionalization of phosphorene with organic and inorganic moieties will be carried out. Doping the phosphorene will provide new functionalized heterostructured 2D sheets. The functionality of the innovative advanced 2D materials will be validated by implanting phosphorene derivatives into different device platforms addressed to applications in material science, catalysis, microelectronics and optoelectronic devices. The final aim of the project is to demonstrate the feasibility of a chain-of-value based on phosphorene platform from synthesis to device realization and implementation. Our results will give an overview on how the chemical and physical properties of phosphorene may be modulated. This will expand enormously the fundamental knowledge on phosphorus-based materials and will open the way to novel applications in different areas.

Mots-clés : phosphorus chemistry,2d materials,structure reactivity relationships
Projet ERC : 4-OCEANS (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : University of Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 565551.25 €

4-OCEANS aims to assess the importance of marine life for human societies during the last two millennia. We contend that the harvest of marine resources played a critical, but as yet underappreciated and poorly understood, role in global history. To bridge this gap in our understanding, the four PIs will form an interdisciplinary team combining expertise in marine environmental history, climate history, natural history, geography, historical ecology and zooarchaeology. We will examine when and where marine exploitation was of significance to human society; how selected major socio-economic, cultural, and environmental forces variously constrained and enabled marine exploitation; and identify the consequences of marine resource exploitation for societal development. Through these objectives we will discover how marine resources as novel wealth altered societies throughout history. How might marine wealth have enabled some societies to escape food shortages? How did it trigger long-term socio-economic impacts and ecological consequences? How were marine resources valued, consumed, and energetically transformed? Revealing this history will open a new window on human-nature dynamics of profound importance for understanding developmental trajectories of human societies. 4-OCEANS will transcend the binary distinctions of East and West, global-north and global-south, indigenous and colonial, resource exploitation and wildlife conservation, nature and culture. In doing so, 4-OCEANS will uncover and chart historical trajectories towards sustainable and unsustainable food security and resource extraction, identifying their complex underlying drivers.

Mots-clés : marine environmental history,environmental archaeology,climate history
Projet ERC : 4-OCEANS (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Columbia University — Pays : Etats-Unis — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 371668.75 €

4-OCEANS aims to assess the importance of marine life for human societies during the last two millennia. We contend that the harvest of marine resources played a critical, but as yet underappreciated and poorly understood, role in global history. To bridge this gap in our understanding, the four PIs will form an interdisciplinary team combining expertise in marine environmental history, climate history, natural history, geography, historical ecology and zooarchaeology. We will examine when and where marine exploitation was of significance to human society; how selected major socio-economic, cultural, and environmental forces variously constrained and enabled marine exploitation; and identify the consequences of marine resource exploitation for societal development. Through these objectives we will discover how marine resources as novel wealth altered societies throughout history. How might marine wealth have enabled some societies to escape food shortages? How did it trigger long-term socio-economic impacts and ecological consequences? How were marine resources valued, consumed, and energetically transformed? Revealing this history will open a new window on human-nature dynamics of profound importance for understanding developmental trajectories of human societies. 4-OCEANS will transcend the binary distinctions of East and West, global-north and global-south, indigenous and colonial, resource exploitation and wildlife conservation, nature and culture. In doing so, 4-OCEANS will uncover and chart historical trajectories towards sustainable and unsustainable food security and resource extraction, identifying their complex underlying drivers.

Mots-clés : marine environmental history,environmental archaeology,climate history
Projet ERC : Q-ROOT (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Université Paris-Saclay — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1143563.59 €

5 years ago, the field of optomechanics has entered the quantum regime. By doing so, this domain which investigates the reciprocal interactions between light and mechanical motion has overcome the long-standing paradox of Quantum Mechanical effects at the macroscopic scale. Such outstanding achievement relies on the so-called “cavity nano-optomechanical” technology, which combines strongly reduced dimensions with ultra-high optical confinement, enabling very large optomechanical coupling rates at the nanoscale. In a more fundamental perspective, decreasing the size of optomechanical systems has enabled minimizing the detrimental effects of decoherence, resulting in a quasi-instantaneous collapse of quantum coherence at a macroscopic scale. At present, optomechanical systems seem to have reached their limits at cryogenic temperatures and remain overly sensitive to decoherence at room temperature to display any quantum behaviour. The project Q-ROOT proposes a novel cavity optomechanical approach showing such unprecedentedly large coupling rates that it will operate in the quantum regime at room temperature for the first time. Our concept relies on tethering a low-loss nano-optical scatterer at the edge of the lightest possible mechanical device that is a carbon nanotube resonator. This system is expected to outperform the state-of-the-art (including atom–based systems) by orders of magnitude, even at room temperature. Amongst objectives, Q-ROOT notably plans to demonstrate ground-state cooling, strong ponderomotive squeezing, the standard quantum limit, quantum non-demolition of mechanical Fock states, and optomechanical photon blockade at room temperature. Besides very fundamental impact, the unique sensing abilities of the system developed in Q-ROOT will be further utilized in order to perform quantum limited sensing applications at room temperature, paving a generalized use of optomechanics for quantum sensing and information technology at room temperature.

Mots-clés : quantum optomechanics,quantum mechanics
Projet ERC : Q-ROOT (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Nottingham — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 356436.41 €

5 years ago, the field of optomechanics has entered the quantum regime. By doing so, this domain which investigates the reciprocal interactions between light and mechanical motion has overcome the long-standing paradox of Quantum Mechanical effects at the macroscopic scale. Such outstanding achievement relies on the so-called “cavity nano-optomechanical” technology, which combines strongly reduced dimensions with ultra-high optical confinement, enabling very large optomechanical coupling rates at the nanoscale. In a more fundamental perspective, decreasing the size of optomechanical systems has enabled minimizing the detrimental effects of decoherence, resulting in a quasi-instantaneous collapse of quantum coherence at a macroscopic scale. At present, optomechanical systems seem to have reached their limits at cryogenic temperatures and remain overly sensitive to decoherence at room temperature to display any quantum behaviour. The project Q-ROOT proposes a novel cavity optomechanical approach showing such unprecedentedly large coupling rates that it will operate in the quantum regime at room temperature for the first time. Our concept relies on tethering a low-loss nano-optical scatterer at the edge of the lightest possible mechanical device that is a carbon nanotube resonator. This system is expected to outperform the state-of-the-art (including atom–based systems) by orders of magnitude, even at room temperature. Amongst objectives, Q-ROOT notably plans to demonstrate ground-state cooling, strong ponderomotive squeezing, the standard quantum limit, quantum non-demolition of mechanical Fock states, and optomechanical photon blockade at room temperature. Besides very fundamental impact, the unique sensing abilities of the system developed in Q-ROOT will be further utilized in order to perform quantum limited sensing applications at room temperature, paving a generalized use of optomechanics for quantum sensing and information technology at room temperature.

Mots-clés : quantum optomechanics,quantum mechanics
Projet ERC : RuCat (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : University of Manchester — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2498959.0 €

A 2018 joint report from pharma identified organic synthesis as one of the major bottlenecks in drug discovery today. In the highly competitive discovery environments, only fast-to-synthesise molecules are targeted, based mostly on five well-tested and proven synthetic methods. This approach has led to only a small portion of the chemical shape space being explored over the last decades and has been partly blamed for the recent low success rates in new drug development. The report emphasises the need for ideal tools such as late stage functionalisation, which would allow simply replacing any C‒H bond in a bioactive molecule with any desired functionality, thus greatly accelerating the synthesis of new candidates from a lead compound. However, the field of C‒H activation is significantly behind in achieving this aim: most biologically active molecules contain several polar and/or delicate functionalities (‘real world’ molecules), whereas most C‒H activation methods use harsh conditions, incompatible with delicate groups, and catalysts that tend to poison in the presence of polar groups. This ERC Advanced Grant addresses this major challenge by building a new tool-set of ruthenium catalysts that will finally be able to deliver late stage functionalisation on ‘real world’ molecules, thus allowing a new dawn for development not only of new drugs, but also of agrochemicals, aromatic based organic materials and associated areas. The project builds on a recent key mechanistic breakthrough by the PI's group on the operation of Ru-catalysts (Nature Chemistry 2018) that reveals a completely different pathway to catalyst design from that followed in the field in the last two decades. This new class of catalysts presents unprecedented high reactivity and compatibility with sensitive ‘real world’ molecules. The PI is in a unique position to capitalize on this discovery and lead the way towards global late stage functionalisation of ‘real world’ molecules.

Mots-clés : late stage functionalisation,c h activation,homogeneous catalysis
Projet ERC : CHROMOREP (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: Biological Mechanisms, Structures and Functions
Entité participante : The Francis Crick Institute — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1983019.0 €

A PubMed search for ‘epigenetic’ identifies nearly 35,000 entries, yet the molecular mechanisms by which chromatin modification and gene expression patterns are actually inherited during chromosome replication — mechanisms which lie at the heart of epigenetic inheritance of gene expression — are still largely uncharacterised. Understanding these mechanisms would be greatly aided if we could reconstitute the replication of chromosomes with purified proteins. The past few years have seen great progress in understanding eukaryotic DNA replication through the use of cell-free replication systems and reconstitution of individual steps in replication with purified proteins and naked DNA. We will use these in vitro replication systems together with both established and novel chromatin assembly systems to understand: a) how chromatin influences replication origin choice and timing, b) how nucleosomes on parental chromosomes are disrupted during replication and are distributed to daughter chromatids, and c) how chromatin states and gene expression patterns are re-established after passage of the replication fork. We will begin with simple, defined templates to learn basic principles, and we will use this knowledge to reconstitute genome-wide replication patterns. The experimental plan will exploit our well-characterised yeast systems, and where feasible explore these questions with human proteins. Our work will help explain how epigenetic inheritance works at a molecular level, and will complement work in vivo by many others. It will also underpin our long-term research goals aimed at making functional chromosomes from purified, defined components to understand how DNA replication interacts with gene expression, DNA repair and chromosome segregation.
Projet ERC : HBQFTNCER (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Milano-Bicocca — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UNIMIB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1253334.65 €

A central challenge in theoretical physics is to develop non-perturbative or exact methods to describe quantitatively the dynamics of strongly coupled quantum fields. This proposal aims to establish new exact methods for the study of supersymmetric quantum field theories thereby unveiling new integrable structures and fostering new correspondences and dualities. We will develop a new cut-and-sew formalism to compute partition functions and expectation values of observables of supersymmetric gauge theories on compact manifolds through the gluing of a fundamental set of building blocks, the holomorphic blocks. The decomposition of partition functions into holomorphic blocks corresponds to the geometric decomposition of compact manifolds into standard simpler pieces. Similarly the gluing rules for the holomorphic blocks correspond to the geometric gluing rules. The key insight required to exploit the holomorphic block formalism is the deep connection between supersymmetric gauge theories and low dimensional exactly solvable systems such as 2d CFTs, TQFTs and spin chains. Two and four dimensional holomorphic blocks can be reinterpreted as conformal blocks in Liouville theory through an established correspondence between supersymmetric gauge theories and Liouville theory. We will provide a similar realisation of three and five dimensional holomorphic blocks in a new theory, a q-deformed version of Liouville theory where the Virasoro algebra is replaced by the q-deformed Virasoro algebra. We will develop this theory classifying the symmetries of correlation functions. These symmetries will be realised as gauge theory dualities, while the language of the q-deformed Liouville theory will become a new powerful tool to investigate supersymmetric gauge theories.

Mots-clés : super symmetric gauge theories,conformal field theories,topological strings,gauge theory dualities,integrability
Projet ERC : HBQFTNCER (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Surrey — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 33753.35 €

A central challenge in theoretical physics is to develop non-perturbative or exact methods to describe quantitatively the dynamics of strongly coupled quantum fields. This proposal aims to establish new exact methods for the study of supersymmetric quantum field theories thereby unveiling new integrable structures and fostering new correspondences and dualities. We will develop a new cut-and-sew formalism to compute partition functions and expectation values of observables of supersymmetric gauge theories on compact manifolds through the gluing of a fundamental set of building blocks, the holomorphic blocks. The decomposition of partition functions into holomorphic blocks corresponds to the geometric decomposition of compact manifolds into standard simpler pieces. Similarly the gluing rules for the holomorphic blocks correspond to the geometric gluing rules. The key insight required to exploit the holomorphic block formalism is the deep connection between supersymmetric gauge theories and low dimensional exactly solvable systems such as 2d CFTs, TQFTs and spin chains. Two and four dimensional holomorphic blocks can be reinterpreted as conformal blocks in Liouville theory through an established correspondence between supersymmetric gauge theories and Liouville theory. We will provide a similar realisation of three and five dimensional holomorphic blocks in a new theory, a q-deformed version of Liouville theory where the Virasoro algebra is replaced by the q-deformed Virasoro algebra. We will develop this theory classifying the symmetries of correlation functions. These symmetries will be realised as gauge theory dualities, while the language of the q-deformed Liouville theory will become a new powerful tool to investigate supersymmetric gauge theories.

Mots-clés : super symmetric gauge theories,conformal field theories,topological strings,gauge theory dualities,integrability