Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : FishLEGs (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université d'Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Life history is one of the most central concepts in biology. Numerous biological questions ultimately revolve around the causes and consequences of variation in reproduction and survival i.e. fitness. Tremendous effort has been put in establishing the causes and mechanisms for life history trait variation and trade-offs. But even in well studied model organisms, evolutionary genetic and functional genomic approaches are rarely combined, and thus the path from genotype to phenotype often remains a black box. A strategy to overcome this major hurdle has recently emerged, with the discovery of loci that explain exceptionally large proportions of the variation in various life history traits. These “life-history genes” offer new opportunities to study not just the why (evolution) but also the how (functional genetics) of life history trait variation. I will address critical outstanding questions by bridging functional and evolutionary genetics approaches to study multiple loci linked with life-history traits including age at maturity, migration timing and migration strategy in 3 fish species: Atlantic salmon, Rainbow trout/steelhead and Atlantic cod. The relatively simple genetic architecture of the traits, combined with the features of these species as model systems, offer a unique opportunity to finally reveal the genetic architectures, molecular mechanisms and ecological drivers that translate large-effect genotypes into adapted life history phenotypes, and examine how evolution shapes these processes. In FishLEGs I will: i) characterize the molecular functions behind genotype-life history associations; ii) elucidate life history trait reaction norms and evolution in variable environments and iii) determine the strength of natural and sexual selection on life history traits, their sex specific effects, and model the evolutionary consequences. Life history research also has societal relevance for health, sustainable fisheries, conservation and climate resilience.

Mots-clés : evolutionary biology,evolutionary functional genomics,population genetics,sexual conflict,sexual selection,sex specific differences,fishes,conservation and management,ecological genomics,evolutionary genomics
Projet ERC : MORE (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université d'Utrecht — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 573750.0 €

This project is a contribution to moral philosophy, to the didactics of transformative reading and to medical ethics education. It examines moral residue (MR); the distress experience common among health care practitioners as well as other moral agents of recognizing what they take to be their own failure to meet a moral requirement, despite not being fully blameworthy for that failure; and which they express through regret or anguish. Our overall aim is threefold: (1) to substantially advance the philosophical and phenomenological understanding of MR, as a concept and as an experience, by analysing situations of MR caused by moral dilemmas, and by directing attention to situations that have not been explored or are under-explored - MR caused by unavoidable normative ignorance or by impermissible emotions; (2) to empirically study the impact of literary narrative fiction (that is thematically related to MR) in altering concepts of self and others, a process we call “transformative reading”, and (3) to devise, and to empirically test the potential merits of a novel narrative method for medical ethics education that we believe can enable health care practitioners to learn how to acknowledge their inherent vulnerability to MR, and to accept that they are likely to fail morally in ways that they may not be able to avoid, without this acceptance compromising their sense of dignity as moral agents. The aims are intimately connected in that it is the philosophical research into MR which motivates and enables the didactic part of the project, and which thereby binds it together into an integrated whole. The investigation is conducted in health care because this context makes apparent the full range of contingencies in life that impose limits to the rational exercise of moral agency, and which thereby lock agents into diversified situations of MR. However, since MR is pervasive also outside of health care, we believe it will benefit other branches of applied ethics as well.

Mots-clés : acceptance,aporia,dialogue,didactics,disease,catharsis,comedy,error,fallibility,fear,diminished agency,impermissible emotions,laughter,moral agency,moral conflict,moral dilemma,normative ignoranc,pity,ridicule,shame,taboos,tragedy,transformative reading
Projet ERC : REVAMP (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: B iological  Mechanisms , Structures  and Functions
Entité participante : Université d'Utrecht — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

In REVAMP, I will create innovative structural mass spectrometry (MS) and proteomics techniques to generate an unprecedented molecular understanding of the diversity and structural and functional characteristics of human antibody repertoires. These repertoires are highly personal and play a key role in our human immune response. Recently, my research has taken a novel challenging avenue, with a focus on the development of cutting-edge MS-based techniques to better understand antibody structure and function. With these methods, I have started to monitor at the protein level (changes in) endogenous antibody repertoires with clonal resolution, including those induced by antigen-specific polyclonal responses in individuals. Early studies were limited to IgG1, and in REVAMP, I aim to expand the toolbox to the full antibody repertoire, including all (sub)classes of antibodies. I aim to learn how and why antibody profiles in serum, and other body fluids, are alike or distinct, investigating structural, clonal and functional differences over time and between individuals. I will develop technologies to target the sub-repertoires recognizing antigens from pathogens. Following identification by advanced top-down and bottom up de novo sequencing these antibodies will be followed up functionally as potential therapeutic leads. Special attention will be given to IgM, the largest human antibody, appearing first in the response to an antigen. We recently made the preliminary striking observation that its structure is ill-defined in textbooks, and that human IgM may be quite different from IgM in other mammals. This project will benefit from our recent advances in structural analysis by single molecule mass spectrometry, mass photometry, atomic force microscopy and electron microscopy. REVAMP will overhaul our current view of the structural diversity of our human antibody repertoire and thereby elevate our understanding of how the human immune system functions.

Mots-clés : immunoglobulins mass spectrometry secreted antibodies
Projet ERC : BACtheWINNER (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Teagasc — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : Teagasc
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 197568.75 €

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an ongoing global crisis exacerbated by lack of discovery of novel antimicrobials and absence of investment/innovation in pipelines by the pharmaceutical industry. New alternatives that are target-specific and do not cause collateral damage to the microbiome would revolutionise human and animal health. Bacteriocins are small antibacterial peptides produced by bacteria that are gene-encoded and can be narrow or broad spectrum. They have potential for development of new antimicrobial molecules through discovery and protein engineering resulting in potent, targeted antimicrobials. They have many possible applications including treatment of gut and topical infections, and microbiome editing. However, basic research issues stand in the way of their exploitation including low production levels often in unsuitable hosts, resistance development in bacterial targets, and inadequate potency/inhibition spectrum. The main aim of BACtheWINNER is to develop bacteriocins as novel antimicrobials by solving these challenges through combining and innovating state-of-the-art technologies in peptide bioengineering and molecular genetics, which will lay the foundation for the generation of this new family of therapeutics that target WHO and CDC priority pathogens and undesirable microbiota. To achieve this, a four-phase bacteriocin discovery and development pipeline will be implemented which takes new and existing bacteriocins and improves them through bioengineering, develops optimal combinations, (over-)produces them in desirable hosts, and validates their use in preclinical models of human infection and disease. This will pave the way for their development as precision microbiome tools and antimicrobials against AMR pathogens. We bring together unique expertise necessary to deliver this project by combining bacteriocin and microbiome research with genetic manipulation of food and gut bacteria.

Mots-clés : bacteriocin,microbiome,bioengineering,
Projet ERC : RIGHTS-TO-UNITE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2498916.0 €

Among the many crises of the European Union (EU), the fracturing of its promise to integrate the emerging European society peacefully through law represents a fundamental one. At the time of writing, martial conflict and pressure through economic sanctions are once again relied upon to assuage conflict in the EU’s neighbourhood, while the authority of EU law has been challenged by several Constitutional Courts, most recently by the Romanian and the Polish supreme courts in December and September 2021. The question thus is: can the EU still rely on the integrative capacity of its law? RIGHTS-TO-UNITE addresses this question by placing citizens’ practical usage of substantive EU-derived rights at its centre. It conceptualises rights as claims between citizens as well as between citizens and states and the EU itself. European integration is defined as a process combining citizen into a coherent, though diverse, society. This approach captures whether and if so, how integration through rights can succeed in a multipolar society constituted by European Union law, both in the EU and its neighbourhood, while also specifying conditions which are supportive and averse to achieving integration of the emerging European society. After theorising conditions for EU-derived rights to integrate the emerging European society in the EU and its neighbourhood, qualitative comparative research is deployed to identify to what extent EU derived rights are part of Europe’s living law in the EU and beyond. The qualitative research develops an innovative methodology comprising interactive vignettes visualising scenarios in which EU economic, social, and digital rights could be relevant. This enables cross-cultural exploration of citizens’ everyday experience with EU derived rights. In a final step the results are synthesised in a socio-legal theory of integration through rights for the context of the EU and its neighbourhood.

Mots-clés : integration through rights,european society,eu citizens rights,eu neighbourhood,european integration,differentiated integration,variegated geography
Projet ERC : BYGENEX (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
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 : 2498215.0 €

Oceanic bacterivory is the process through which marine bacteria are grazed by microbial eukaryotes. It consumes a large fraction of bacterial production, transfers bacterial biomass to upper trophic levels, and completes the inorganic nutrient recycling needed for regenerated primary production. Global estimates indicate that ~15% of the Earth's primary production circulates through this process. Despite its central role in marine food webs, the identity of the dominant grazers is not well known, and in situ bacterivory rates are seldom measured as they require laborious techniques. Consequently, it is impossible to predict how oceanic bacterivory will react in light of the dramatic anthropogenic change we are facing. The aim of BYGENEX is to fill this gap and develop a quantitative approach to study oceanic bacterivory by using emerging omics-based tools that target marker genes for phagocytosis, the cellular mechanism behind bacterivory. We will first prepare an exhaustive collection of genomes from the main bacterivores in the global ocean. Then, we will identify highly expressed genes involved in phagocytosis in cultured and uncultured species across taxonomic lineages. We will perform in situ expression analysis of phagocytosis marker genes to quantify bacterivory rates of the community and of the dominant species, after calibration with direct activity measures. Finally, data from cruises will benchmark the present state of bacterivory in a range of oceanic regimes, and we will simulate bacterivory using a global ecosystem model to analyse ecosystem-wide effects of this process. BYGENEX will provide new tools to quantify oceanic bacterivory at unprecedented large scales and open the way to improve our current understanding of the structure and function of the microbial component and its role in the global marine system.

Mots-clés : bacterivory,ecosystem models,functional genes,gene expression,immunochemistry,microbial food webs,metatranscriptomics,phagocytosis,single cell genomics
Projet ERC : IslandLife (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
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 : 2483723.75 €

Biodiversity is declining globally at an unprecedented rate. Representing ~30% of the biodiversity hotspots, islands are particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic activities, indeed 80% of reported extinctions are island species. Yet, unique island biodiversity – which includes not only the species but also the myriad of interactions among them – is still greatly unknown. It is thus urgent to describe it and forecast the consequences of its annihilation so we can mitigate the effect of further losses. Detecting ecological interactions and understanding their complexity is, however, one of the big challenges in the natural sciences. The advent of new theories and analytical tools, such as critical transition theory and complex network analysis, provides hope to reach that goal. As relatively simple systems with well-defined borders, islands have a great potential to advance our comprehension of nature complexity. IslandLife will provide the most comprehensive and quantitatively sophisticated study of multilayer networks to date in any terrestrial ecosystem. We will focus on five archipelagos encompassing four oceans and a wide latitudinal gradient, comparing for the first time the food web structure of ‘pristine’ (little-disturbed) islands (of a few km2) with areas of similar size in nearby disturbed (human-inhabited) islands. The objective is to unveil the unique biodiversity of these ecosystems, understand their complexity, and evaluate their fragility to global change drivers, such as biological invasions. We will combine direct observations during intense fieldwork, automated-video monitoring and deep-learning, cutting-edge molecular techniques, and newly developed coextinction models to predict persistence and resilience of island biota to disturbances. The project will represent a major breakthrough towards understanding the effects of global change on these valuable ecosystems, of great relevance to both theoretical ecologists and applied conservationists.

Mots-clés : ecological complexity island ecology food webs multilayer networks species interactions biological invasions disturbance metabarcoding automated video monitoring computer vision deep learning coextinction models network reassembly habitat restoration
Projet ERC : ANTICIPATE (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 250000.0 €

Armed conflict is human development in reverse. The full scale of conflicts’ impacts remains unknown, however, and fragmentation of research into multiple academic fields limits our understanding. This multidisciplinary project brings together scholars from economics, epidemiology, political science, and conflict research to study the impacts in much more detail and comprehensiveness than earlier studies. It takes a risk analysis perspective, assessing the expected impact as a function of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability, and consider effects at both the macro and micro level, on economies, health, and political institutions. It will model exposure to conflict events by accounting for how effects of observed, overt violence are transmitted to locations far from the violence itself and over time, identify conditions that make local communities, marginalized groups, and women particularly vulnerable to the effects, and study how conflict increases their vulnerability to other shocks such as natural disasters. The objective of the project is to model hazard as a probability distribution over the predicted number of direct deaths from violence in locations across the world, exposure as a model for how local populations will be affected by this likely violence, and vulnerability how exposure is translated into adverse human development impact for these populations. The results will be coordinated in the form of a monthly updated early-warning system, expanding the well-established ViEWS model, to also alert observers to particularly detrimental occurrences of violence. Throughout, the project will study how the various impacts and vulnerabilities identified work to reinforce each other, and formulate policy recommendations for parties seeking to reduce the impact on human development.
Projet ERC : PeroSpiker (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 100000.0 €

A brain is a complex structure where computing and memory are tightly intertwined at very low power cost of operation, by analog signals across vast quantities of synapse-connected spiking neurons. Animal brains react intelligently to environmental events and perceptions. By developing similar Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) we can realize neuromorphic computation systems excellent for dealing with large amounts of noisy data and stimuli and very well suited for perception, cognition and motor tasks. But the current CMOS technologies perform very poorly for emulating the biological brains and their power consumption is large. Currently we cannot replicate biological neurons behaviours with existing design and manufacturing technology. This project aims to develop compact miniature material elements that will emulate closely the complex dynamic behaviour of neurons and synapses, to form SNNs with substantial reduction in footprint, complexity and energy cost for perception, learning and computation. We investigate the properties of metal halide perovskite that have produced excellent photovoltaic devices in the last decade. These perovskites have ionic/electronic conduction, hysteresis, memory effect and switchable and nonlinear behaviour, that make them ideally suited for the realization of devices in close fidelity to biological electrochemically gated membranes in neurons, and information-tracking synapses. We will use the methodology of impedance spectroscopy and equivalent circuit analysis to fabricate devices with dynamic responses emulating the natural neuronal coupling and synchronization. This method will produce the hardware that we need for a preferred spiking computational model, incorporating time, analog physical elements and dynamical complexity as computational tools. As illustration we will show visual object recognition from spiking data provided by a spiking retina by advanced neuristors and dynamic synapses.

Mots-clés : neurons,perovskites,impedance,neuromorphic computation
Projet ERC : PLANETES (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : European Southern Observatory — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : ESO
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 727357.5 €

The project's objective is to develop PLANETES, a pioneering ground-based interferometric system, engineered to transform the study of exoplanet atmospheres through high-contrast observations. The primary goal is to significantly enhance the dynamic range of optical interferometry, enabling the observation of exoplanets via their reflected stellar light. Other objectives include investigating the atmospheric composition of known exoplanets and identifying potential protoplanets. The strategy involves setting up a laboratory bench to scrutinize and address the current limitations observed with the GRAVITY instrument at the VLTI. These enhancements will then be deployed at the Paranal Observatory to examine the multitude of exoplanets anticipated from forthcoming Gaia spacecraft data releases. PLANETES is set to be the first ground-based instrument capable of observing exoplanets via reflected light, offering a contrast range of 10 million at less than 100 milliarcsecond. It will significantly surpass the detection and characterization capabilities of current ground-based instruments. In addition to fostering significant advancements in exoplanetary research, this project encompasses the development of a ground-breaking 4-million-pixel infrared camera. This device, equipped with a very low read noise and low dark current detector, will unveil new potential in high-contrast astronomical instrumentation. For the first time, it will allow to simultaneously have a good spectral resolution and high sensitivity, representing a significant leap in the field. This pioneering technology will set the stage for future instruments, yielding broad advantages to the scientific community at large.

Mots-clés : long baseline optical interferometry direct detection of exoplanets