Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : SCUBA CANCERS (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems
Entité participante : University of Santiago de Compostela — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : USC
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 989463.8 €

Clonally transmissible cancers are somatic cell lineages that are transmitted between individuals via the transfer of living cancer cells. There are only three known types of naturally occurring clonally transmissible cancers, one of which is a leukemia-like cancer found in marine bivalves, called hemic neoplasia (HN). HN in cockles Cerastoderma edule offers an unique opportunity, over the other naturally occurring transmissible cancers, for the discovery of the genetic drivers of cancer transmissibility because: (1) cockle HN has a polyphyletic origin, which allows the identification of recurrently mutated genes among different unrelated cockle HN lineages; (2) HN provides a reliable in vitro and in vivo model that could be used for driver gene discovery and validation by means of genetic engineering methods; (3) cockle HN represents a nearly endless source of biological resources for study and experimentation on the origins and development of natural clonally transmissible cancers, due to the ubiquity of cockles throughout the Western Atlantic coast of Europe and the high prevalence of HN (>20%). Using HN in cockles as a model for clonally transmissible cancers, this project intends to identify the genomic alterations and mutational processes that drive transmissible cancers to depart from their hosts and evolve as parasitic clonal lineages in the marine environment, for illuminating universal processes that make a cancer contagious, and to identify new/unexpected biological insights into the general mechanisms of cancer metastasis. We will first characterize the clonal structure of cockle transmissible cancers by phylogenetic approaches. Then, we will use NGS analysis to catalogue the somatic alterations that characterize different HN clonal lineages, figure out the mutational processes that operate in marine transmissible cancers, and identify the putative cancer genes that drive cancer transmissibility, which will be finally validated by genome editing approach

Mots-clés : cancer genomics,next generation sequencing
Projet ERC : IMPACT (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Spanish National Research Council — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Coated conductors (CCs), known as the second generation of high temperature superconductors (2G-HTS), have triggered broad and fruitful R&D efforts to ensure industrial scalability and enable wide market adoption. Major challenges currently limit the practical use of HTS conductors. First, the high cost / performance ratio imposed by the fabrication methods of kilometre-lengths epitaxial YBCO films that work at too low growth rates limits CC manufacturing throughput. Second, the low throughput in the production of CCs leads to a severe limitation in generating drastic cost reductions for CCs, required for wide market implementation. Due to overall cost, today it remains inefficient to unlock the potential of large-scale applications such as wind turbines, highly efficient and compact industrial scale generators, Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage and advanced HTS MRI/RMN machines. The overall objective of this Proof of Concept (PoC) proposal is to demonstrate the commercial relevance and to build a business strategy for the industrial scale-up of a new manufacturing process for HTS films, which will push the emerging HTS industry to full market adoption. IMPACT combines low cost (CSD), high throughput (TLA ultrafast growth) and high performance (strained nanocomposites), by integrating additive manufacturing processes and digital printing, to deliver a commercially relevant and industry scalable manufacturing process for HTS CCs. Our value creation process is focused on several inflection points which will pave the way towards commercial implementation of our novel manufacturing process. At the end of IMPACT, we aim to capture value by having identified the commercial exploitation strategies of our technology.

Mots-clés : high temperature superconductors,coated conductors,transient liquid growth,chemical solutions deposition
Projet ERC : SCOOBi (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2483490.0 €

Coccolithophores and foraminifera, single-celled mineralising plankton, convert atmospheric CO2 into limestone. Together, they produce over 2 billion tonnes of calcite/year. Anthropogenic change creates myriad threats to the future of marine calcifiers, the foundation of the ocean ecosystem and global carbon cycle. Much work has focussed on the impact of acidification and declining carbonate saturation state on calcifier mineralisation. But the modern ocean is four times supersaturated with respect to calcite. Hence SCOOBi asks: What limits modern marine calcification rates? How will they respond to future change? All modern marine carbonate producers are solar-powered and rely directly on photosynthesis. To understand how calcification rates are limited, it is necessary to discover how the environment controls the flow of energy from photosynthesis to calcification. Controls on calcification rates have been elusive until now. Experimental manipulations of calcifiers test only immediate physiological responses. Palaeomethods suffer from preservational artefact, including dissolution of ¾ of all calcite produced. For the first time, a unique merger of cutting-edge approaches allows the calcification efficiency of species, and calcite production rates of communities, to be reconstructed from the geological record. Using an ambitious and high risk-high reward combination of genetics, (palaeo)metabolomics, (palaeo)physiology, and stable isotope geochemistry, SCOOBi will document and build a mechanistic understanding of pelagic calcification rates and transform our ability to predict their response to environmental change. It uses the natural laboratory of sediments to reveal how environmental factors select for calcification efficiency, which can be validated experimentally. SCOOBi will test the controversial hypothesis that pelagic calcification is limited by carbon and phosphate availability in the modern ocean, and pelagic calcifiers will flourish into the future.

Mots-clés : biomineralisation,ocean carbonate system,pelagic
Projet ERC : CCT (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Cardiff University — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998305.0 €

Cognitive control regulates our thoughts and actions, helping us avoid impulsive behaviours that are inappropriate, costly or dangerous. In recent years, evidence has emerged that training in behavioural tasks that promote response inhibition or avoidance of specific stimuli can enhance cognitive control, reducing overeating and alcohol consumption. Despite the promising nature of cognitive control training (CCT), we know little about which CCT methods are most effective, how individual differences determine training outcomes, whether CCT produces benefits for real-life behaviour, and how CCT alters – and is determined by – the structure and function of the brain. My aim is to discover what works in CCT and how the effects of training relate to neurophysiology. Subproject 1 will be the largest ever trial on the effectiveness of different CCT methods for achieving weight loss, recruiting 36,000 participants worldwide to complete an internet-based training programme via the Guardian. This study will reveal, with high statistical power, which CCT methods are the most effective and which individual differences are most important for producing real-life benefits. Subproject 2 will investigate how CCT influences neurobiology, and how individual differences in neurobiology influence CCT outcomes. In Subproject 2a, I will focus on theoretically predicted changes to GABAergic systems in prefrontal and motor cortex, and I will test the effect of GABAergic brain stimulation on training outcomes. In Subproject 2b, I will use concurrent brain stimulation (TMS) and brain imaging (fMRI) to test how CCT alters top-down coupling between prefrontal cortex and remote regions that mediate reward and emotion. I will also study how CCT alters, and is altered by, white matter microstructure. This project promises to advance understanding of the causal determinants and moderators of CCT, with implications for its suitability as a clinical adjunct in addiction therapy and behaviour change.

Mots-clés : cognitive control,response inhibition,cognitive training,brain stimulation,neuroimaging,transcranial magnetic stimulation,functional magnetic resonance imaging
Projet ERC : CRISP (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : University of Luxembourg — Pays : Luxembourg — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1148290.0 €

Cognitive impairment and dementia have dramatic individual and social consequences, and create high economic costs for societies. In order to delay cognitive aging of future generations as long as possible, we need evidence about which contextual factors are most supportive for individuals to reach highest cognitive levels relative to their potential. At the same time, for current older generations, we need scalable methods to exactly identify individuals at risk of cognitive impairment. The project intends to apply recent methodological and statistical advancements to reach two objectives. Firstly, contextual influences on cognitive aging will be comparatively assessed, with a focus on inequalities related to educational opportunities and gender inequalities. This will be done using longitudinal, population-representative, harmonized cross-national aging surveys, merged with contextual information. Secondly, the project will quantify the ability of singular and clustered individual characteristics, such as indicators of cognitive reserve and behaviour change, to predict cognitive aging and diagnosis of dementia. Project methodology will rely partly on parametric ‘traditional’ multilevel- or fixed-effects modelling, partly on non-parametric statistical learning approaches, to address objectives both hypothesis- and data-driven. Applying statistical learning techniques in the field of cognitive reserve will open new research avenues for efficient handling of large amounts of data, among which most prominently the accurate prediction of health and disease outcomes. Quantifying the role of contextual inequalities related to education and gender will guide policymaking in and beyond the project. Assessing risk profiles of individuals in relation to cognitive aging will support efficient and scalable risk screening of individuals. Identifying the value of behaviour change to delay cognitive impairment will guide treatment plans for individuals affected by dementia.

Mots-clés : cognitive function,cognitive aging,dementia,inequality of educational opportunities,gender inequalities,older age,life course,cognitive screening,statistical learning,applied predictive model
Projet ERC : QUSCALE (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Chalmers University of Technology — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2047500.0 €

Coherent quantum systems are globally pursued in the race to build a compelling technology. One fast-developing approach uses high-fidelity microwave qubits. Major research efforts in academia and industry are demonstrating an elementary form of supremacy over classical technology by moving to tens and hundreds of such cryogenic qubits. However, it is currently impossible to connect the qubits well beyond a single refrigerator while preserving their fragile quantum properties – limiting their use outside the laboratory. Optical photons, with their long-distance and near-noiseless propagation along room-temperature fibers, are uniquely placed to tackle this challenge. In QUSCALE, we will realize deployable converters between microwave and optical photons. We will build chips that convert between microwave and optical quantum information. The chips will let us increase the size of emerging quantum processors and networks to a level where we can perform useful tasks beyond the reach of classical systems. To find use outside the laboratory, the converters must minimize the energy that is dissipated per converted qubit between microwaves and optics. Dissipated energy will determine whether microwave quantum processors can scale up via optics. We will achieve major reductions in the dissipated energy per converted qubit. The proposed devices will create a fundamentally new tool for physicists and engineers. They will enable a series of increasingly impactful networking tasks on the way to entanglement between distant microwave qubits, addressing an urgent need for optical interconnects between microwave quantum processors.

Mots-clés : nanophotonics,optical interconnects,silicon photonics,distributed quantum processors and networks,optomechanics,superconducting circuits,piezoelectric transducers
Projet ERC : COLMIN (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : Radboud University Nijmegen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

Collagen mineralization in bone is one of the most crucial processes in our body as it supplies the skeleton on which we depend for support and protection. Bone’s impressive mechanical properties arise from the hierarchical organization of the organic collagen matrix that is mineralized with ultrathin, aligned inorganic crystals of carbonated hydroxyapatite. Despite its importance to the human body, relatively little is understood about collagen mineralization and how the proteins govern mineral growth with such precision. This is because the matrix development is a complex process with different stages that occur over multiple length scales and depends on many different components. I propose to obtain the first comprehensive picture of the collagen mineralization mechanism by unraveling its dynamics and structural details. It is not only of great fundamental importance, it also opens the way to the development of better biomaterials, as well as to strategies for the treatment of mineralization-related diseases. I will achieve this ambitious goal by designing a dedicated tissue engineering platform that models real bone as closely as possible, and will allow application of multiple advanced analysis techniques. These I will employ in a “Google Earth” approach, studying the process from the micrometer to the nanometer scale, combining live cell imaging and “beyond state-of-the-art” electron microscopy with chemical and biochemical analysis to reveal the details of collagen mineralization with the highest spatial, temporal and molecular resolution thus far. Exploiting my extensive expertise in the field of biomineralization and advanced electron microscopy, COLMIN will provide a major step in understanding collagen formation and mineralization, and provide insights that will help to fight bone-related diseases. The advanced multidisciplinary methodology developed here will set a new standard for the advanced analysis of bone formation and other biological processes.

Mots-clés : biomineralization,cryo electron microscopy,collagen mineralization,apatite,correlative,bone,non collagenous proteins,siblings
Projet ERC : ColloQuantO (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : Weizmann Institute of Science — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals have already found significant use in various arenas, including bioimaging, displays, lighting, photovoltaics and catalysis. Here we aim to harness the extremely broad synthetic toolbox of colloidal semiconductor quantum dots in order to utilize them as unique sources of quantum states of light, extending well beyond the present attempts to use them as single photon sources. By tailoring the shape, size, composition and the organic ligand layer of quantum dots, rods and platelets, we propose their use as sources exhibiting a deterministic number of emitted photons upon saturated excitation and as tunable sources of correlated and entangled photon pairs. The versatility afforded in their fabrication by colloidal synthesis, rather than by epitaxial growth, presents a potential pathway to overcome some of the significant limitations of present-day solid state sources of nonclassical light, including color tunability, fidelity and ease of assembly into devices. This program is a concerted effort both on colloidal synthesis of complex multicomponent semiconductor nanocrystals and on cutting edge photophysical studies at the single nanocrystal level. This should enable new types of emitters of nonclassical light, as well as provide a platform for the implementation of recently suggested schemes in quantum optics which have never been experimentally demonstrated. These include room temperature sources of exactly two (or more) photons, correlated photon pairs from quantum dot molecules and entanglement based on time reordering. Fulfilling the optical and material requirements from this type of system, including photostability, control of carrier-carrier interactions, and a large quantum yield, will inevitably reveal some of the fundamental properties of coupled carriers in strongly confined structures.

Mots-clés : colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals,quantum dots,single photons,entangled photons,multiexcitons,nanoplatelets
Projet ERC : GeoScape (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Hungarian Academy of Sciences — Pays : Hongrie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MTA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2009433.75 €

Combinatorics is a fundamental mathematical discipline whose study has experienced unprecedented growth during the past few decades. Its rapid development can be partially explained by spectacular applications of extremal combinatorics in additive number theory, information theory, theoretical computer science, and elsewhere. Asymptotic results in extremal and probabilistic combinatorics have proved to be powerful tools in the structural and algorithmic analysis of huge networks such as the internet graph, brain maps, social networks, and integrated circuits. We have deep, well developed algebraic, topological, and probabilistic techniques to tackle some basic problems of modern combinatorics, but many classic Ramsey-, Turán-, and Szemerédi-type questions remained open. The main goal of the proposed work is to attack some hard problems for large classes of graphs and hypergraphs arising in geometric, algebraic, and practical applications. These structures escape the "curse of dimensionality”: they can be embedded in a bounded-dimensional space, or they have small VC-dimension, or a short algebraic description. The work of the principal investigator, his collaborators and students has played a significant role in the introduction of modern combinatorial tools in geometry. In the present project, he aims to explore the reverse direction: to develop and apply geometric techniques to settle important special cases of notoriously difficult combinatorial problems on (1) bounded degree semi-algebraic graphs and hypergraphs, (2) graphs and hypergraph of bounded VC-dimension, (3) ordered graphs, 0-1 matrices, and graphs embedded in the plane or in other surfaces. Progress on the problems described in the proposal is expected to lead closer to the solution of some classical problems such as the Erdős-Hajnal conjecture, the Danzer-Rogers conjecture, the Schur-Erdős problem, and to the development of improved algorithms for clustering and property testing in huge graphs.

Mots-clés : graph,network,vc dimension,partial order,regularity lemma,clustering,property testing,string graph,semi algebraic graph,forbidden pattern,epsilon net,transversal,extremal combinatorics,random sampling,cutting lemma
Projet ERC : FACEDIFF (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Liverpool — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 180655.0 €

Communicating with others via the face is crucial for navigating our social world. Deficits in facial expression production can have debilitating effects on social interaction, characterising several clinical conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease. Despite this, we know surprisingly little about individual differences in facial expressivity in the typical population, what causes these differences and whether such differences impact on individual lives. In part, this could be due to an historical focus on the universal nature of facial expression, assigning individual difference to random ‘noise’, rather than an evolutionarily relevant characteristic. The FACEDIFF project will diverge from this classic approach and test the novel hypothesis that individual differences in facial expressivity equip individuals’ differentially to engage with their social environment: expressivity has a benefit (social engagement) but also a cost (over-exposure and thus risk of being cheated by others) and is related to the size and quality of an individual’s social network. FACEDIFF will combine psychological, anatomical and cross-species methods to provide the first thorough interdisciplinary investigation of individual differences. First, individual variation in production and perception of facial expressions will be measured via laboratory experiments and in relation to social network size and quality. Second, variation in human facial musculature will be documented through cadaveric dissection and existing MRI databases. Third, facial expressivity will be examined in a primate model to determine whether patterns are unique to humans. This project will be the first to provide a comprehensive and interdisciplinary perspective on individual differences in facial expression and will stimulate new theories on the function and evolution of individual differences in humans.

Mots-clés : facial expression,communication,universality,anatomy,evolution