Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CYNIPS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Institute of Science and Technology Austria — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ISTA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499706.0 €

Multicellularity in plants and animals arose independently, as reflected in dramatically different signalling mechanism make-ups. Intracellular signalling’s central paradigm in animals is the concept of ‘second messengers’- most prominently cAMP and cGMP. Contrastingly, in plants, cAMP/cGMP are not part of mainstream ideas on signalling. Our recent, unexpected identification of cAMP and cGMP acting in the canonical signalling for the phytohormone auxin inspired a paradigm-shifting hypothesis that cAMP and cGMP act as largely unappreciated versatile second messengers in multiple plant signalling pathways. This would dramatically expand the modes of plant intracellular signalling, opening possibilities for additional regulations and crosstalks. It would also provide a new means of targeted engineering of signalling outputs, highly relevant for plant biotechnology. To systematically explore this radical hypothesis, I propose to generate (opto)genetic tools to (i) monitor and (ii) specifically manipulate cellular cAMP/GMP levels. Our vRootchip microfluidics set-up allows us to (iii) survey the plant signalling landscape and identify pathways involving cAMP/GMP further supported by (iv) identification of thus-far elusive cAMP/cGMP targets. As a blueprint for the use of the generated tools and knowledge, we plan (v) to elucidate the role of cGMP in phytohormone jasmonate signalling. Together, these approaches will establish cAMP/cGMP as bona fide second messengers in plants. We provide a rich resource to investigate their involvement in any chosen signalling mechanism or cellular response, while offering tools to manipulate their signalling output for both fundamental discoveries and targeted applications. This strategy poses considerable intellectual and methodological challenges, but our robust initial results, including functionality of cAMP/cGMP sensors, show a conceptual breakthrough is feasible, dramatically expanding our current view on plant signalling and beyond.

Mots-clés : phytohormones,plant signalling,second messengers,camp,cgmp,fluorescent sensors,ja signalling
Projet ERC : CA3-SYNGRAM (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Institute of Science and Technology Austria — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ISTA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

A fundamental question in neuroscience is how information in brain circuits is stored and retrieved. However, the physical and chemical changes underlying the formation of memories, or “engrams”, are largely elusive. Although recent work identified engram cells, the nanoscopic changes at synapses during engram formation remain unclear. New experimental techniques allow us to probe the subcellular and synaptic components of the engram: functional analysis by multicellular electrophysiology, structural analysis by superresolution light and electron microscopy, and optical recording and stimulation techniques in vivo. Here, we propose to combine these techniques to reveal engrams in the hippocampal CA3 network. This circuit is ideally suited to identify engrams, as it plays a critical role in learning and memory, forms the largest recurrent network throughout the brain, and receives powerful input from hippocampal granule cells, previously defined as engram cells. The project has two main goals. First, we want to identify the physical and chemical changes in the CA3 network during engram formation, especially changes in synaptic transmission and network connectivity. Thus, we will be able to rigorously test cellular, synaptic, and connectomic hypotheses of the engram. Second, we want to probe the rules of synaptic engram storage (“engraphy“), the mechanisms of engram retrieval (“ecphory“), and the behavioral content of the engrams. Hence, we will be able to enrich the classical engram concept with quantitative data on how synaptic engrams are efficiently stored and reliably retrieved. Taken together, the expected results will lead to a substantial increase in our understanding of engrams, advancing it from the cellular to the synaptic level. The proposed experiments will answer a fundamental question in neuroscience and open new avenues for treatment of brain diseases in humans, in which engram formation or retrieval are impaired.

Mots-clés : glutamatergic synapses,presynaptic terminals,hippocampus,ca3 region,synaptic plasticity,functional connectivity,learning and memory
Projet ERC : ROTAROM17 (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Parme — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 88915.79 €

ROTAROM17 aims to understand the Roman Rota as one of the essential tools of the Catholic Church’s transnational governance in early modern Europe. How did this Rome-based court of appeal, which judged in the pope’s name important civil disputes involving the clergy and members of the social elites, succeed in having its authority respected outside the pontifical state? Why did men and women from Spain, Portugal, or Poland expect to find in Rome a better justice, in spite of the long, cautious and costly Rotal procedure? On which grounds did challenges and criticisms of Rota’s jurisdiction have political significance? Our aim is to study this institution which remains poorly known for this period, but also to see law in action in the settling of disputes, as well as the way in which the court’s jurisprudence, used as a reference by legal experts and disseminated in libraries, contributed to the making of a legal culture founded on negotiation. The project’s second objective is to open a new research field on Europe’s oldest still-active tribunal and facilitate access to its massive and under-used documentation by producing essential research tolls and reference works, thus laying strong foundations for future developments of scholarship. ROTAROM17 brings together an international and multidisciplinary team (social, diplomatic, cultural and intellectual history, legal history) and foregrounds primary research, connecting the Rota’s archival funds with a large set of archival funds and libraries in Europe. By renewing approaches to the Roman Rota, its environment, personal, litigants, and jurisprudence, and by opening up access to hitherto untapped documentation, ROTAROM17 will make a major and original contribution to rethinking the structuring role of the law in European culture and offer new opportunities for historians to explore their local or national fields of research from multiple perspectives in a large set of countries.

Mots-clés : justice,rome,family,nobility,catholic church
Projet ERC : ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Center for Monetary and Financial Studies — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CEMFI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499440.0 €

ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION will push the frontier in energy and environmental economics by addressing and quantifying novel socioeconomic challenges and opportunities that arise as the Energy Transition moves forward. Firstly, there is an urgent need to design new Energy Transition policies while re-designing existing ones. In particular, the prospect that Green Hydrogen might help reduce our dependency on fossil fuels has accelerated the need to define its regulation. Likewise, the recent energy crisis has triggered the debate about the re-design of electricity markets. However, there is no academic research guiding these fundamental policy changes. ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION will pioneer state-of-the-art research on Green Hydrogen regulation and electricity market design through theoretical, empirical, and simulation analyses. Secondly, it is paramount to assess and address the distributional consequences of Energy Transition policies (across regions, workers, and households). In particular, I will delve into the local socioeconomic impacts of the phase-out of coal plants and the phase-in of renewables. While existing research has analyzed the global effects of this structural change, evidence of the local effects is scant. Local opposition against renewables, which has become a major obstacle to their deployment, testifies to the relevance of the local effects. ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION will use recent advances in survey design to provide novel evidence on the local opposition toward renewables while contributing to identifying effective solutions to curb it. Moreover, I will quantify the distributional consequences of rooftop solar policies across households and investigate the under-studied possibility of re-designing them to mitigate their adverse effects. Academics will benefit from the discovery of new methodological approaches to analyze the Energy Transition, while policymakers will gain insight into the solutions for the most compelling socio-economic challenges ahead.

Mots-clés : energy transition,auctions,green hydrogen,migration,low carbon subsidies,distributional impacts,experiments,surveys
Projet ERC : SOMATICART (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Institut Karolinska — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2532795.0 €

Already in 1973, Benditt and Benditt found that the atherosclerotic plaque was clonal and proposed that it was a neoplasm of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC). Recent technical advances have made it possible to analyze somatic mutations in human tissues and show that somatic cells accumulate thousands of mutations during development and aging. While most of the mutations are harmless, some either contribute to disease and aging or are directly disease-causative, as in the formation of tumors in cancer. The arterial wall is in part composed of clonal VSMC elements, making this tissue particularly vulnerable to somatic mutagenesis. However, detailed analysis and insight into the extent of somatic variance in the vascular tissue is lacking. Here we plan to analyze the somatic mutations in the arterial wall and relate it to age-associated cardiovascular disease (CVD). We will create an atlas of somatic mutations in the human arterial wall at single-cell resolution in health and disease. We will apply single-cell sequencing in arterial tissue to map somatic mutations. Functional significance of somatic mutagenesis in the vascular wall will be validated using data on gene regulatory networks of relevance in human CVD and disease models with induced somatic mutations in VSMC. The model will have a mosaic pattern of mutation and fate of mutated cells will be mapped by lineage tracing in the development and progression of CVD. Our research provides insight into the prevalence, nature and functional significance of somatic genetic events in the healthy and diseased vascular wall.

Mots-clés : somatic mutations,early vascular aging,atherosclerosis,calcification,chronic kidney disease,vascular wall,aging
Projet ERC : ensembles (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Institut Karolinska — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Movement is the shared language of behavior across the animal kingdom, orchestrated by dedicated circuits throughout the central nervous system. To survive, animals must move with a high degree of flexibility, requiring precise and rapid changes in speed and trajectory. This flexibility of locomotion depends on the brain's ability to select appropriate motor programs and coordinate body and appendage muscles to match the locomotor movement parameters to the behavioral context. In particular, the brainstem has been identified as the major site for shaping motor commands to provide this flexibility. A key, unsolved question is how the final brainstem commands are generated and adjusted. In this project, we will test a new hypothesis that challenges current views in motor control, namely that the final motor commands driving the flexibility of locomotion movements are the combined product of precise interactions between circuit ensembles in the brainstem and real-time feedback from the spinal circuits. Our approach harnesses the powerful combination of all-optical techniques, scRNAseq, and electrophysiology at single-neuron resolution to determine the principles of circuit integration within and across brainstem circuits in adult zebrafish. This innovative approach will allow us to uncover circuit function, at a level of resolution that has never been achieved before, in a behaving vertebrate animal. By performing a system-wide analysis at single-cell resolution, we expect to gain unique insights that will transform existing views in the field of motor control. This project will chart a novel, system-wide circuit blueprint for movement control and flexibility in vertebrates.

Mots-clés : brainstem,spinal cord,locomotion,motoneurons,motor control
Projet ERC : InfantSimulator (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : École normale supérieure PSL — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : ENS PSL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 206250.0 €

How do infants learn their first language(s)? The popular yet controversial 'statistical learning hypothesis' posits that they learn by gradually collecting statistics over their language inputs. This is strickingly similar to how current AI's Large Language Models (LLMs) learn and shows that simple statistical mechanisms may be sufficient to attain adult-like language competence. But does it? Estimates of language inputs to children show that by age 3, they have received 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less data than LLMs of similar performance. And the gap grows exponentially larger with children's age. Worse, when models are fed with speech instead of text they learn even slower. How are infants so efficient learners? This project tests the hypothesis that in addition to statistical learning, infants benefit from 3 mechanisms that accelerate their learning rate. (1) They are born with a \textit{vocal tract} which helps them understand the link between abstract motor commands and speech sounds, and decode noisy speech inputs more efficiently. (2) They have an \textit{episodic memory} enabling them to learn from unique events, instead of gradually learning from thousands of repetitions. (3) They start with a \textit{evolved learning architecture} optimized for generalisation from few and noisy inputs.  Our approach is to build a computational model of the learner (an infant simulator), which when fed by realistic language input produces outcome measures comparable to children's (laboratory experiments, vocabulary estimates). This gives a quantitative estimate of the efficiency of each 3 mechanisms, as well as new testable predictions. We start with English and French that have both accessible large annotated speech corpora and documented acquisition landmarks and focus on the first three years of life. We then help building similar resources across a larger set of languages by fostering a cross-disciplinary community that shares tools, data and analysis methods.
Projet ERC : LAUDARE (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université de Trente — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1698533.0 €

The lauda, a vibrant expression of popular piety, is the poetic-musical genre that from the second half of the twelfth century marked the birth and the spread of singing in the Italian language. It was based on melodies of varied origins, but mostly functional in orally conveying – through minstrels, lay confraternities and preachers – the dissemination of texts and (not only spiritual) concepts among a largely illiterate population. Despite this ‘volatility’, a good corpus of laude has been preserved in written form for ritual needs, sometimes with musical notation, forming an impressive repository of ‘frozen orality’. While realizing the importance and vastness of this heritage, scholars for over a century have been mainly engaged in alternatively considering it either from a literary or a musical point of view. Therefore, no systematic research has yet to shed light on the specific nature of the phenomenon, its dynamics of creation and transmission and all indicators that make it a reliable mirror of society, culture and mentality in medieval and early Renaissance Italy. The LAUDARE project aims to approach the Italian lauda in its intrinsic intermediality by collecting the whole corpus of texts handed down with music up to the mid 1500s and comprehensively exploring the dynamics of composition and transmission of poems and related tunes according to the mechanisms of orality. An open access database, making searchable the entire corpus, will allow wide-ranging surveys such as the territorial impact of a text and/or its musical setting as well as the diffusion of melodic patterns and text formulas. The results will be collected in a specific volume. Other expected outputs are a handbook, at least ten open access articles, three workshops and two international conferences with proceedings, one of which will have involved related disciplines such as medieval and religious history, linguistics, palaeography, iconography, anthropology, and urban studies.

Mots-clés : italian lauda mediaval music medieval poetry music and poetry intermediality orality digital humanties early music performance medieval history history of mentality
Projet ERC : IDEO-YEMEN (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Studies of Cultures and Arts
Entité participante : Université de Bristol — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 79276.0 €

The stellar rise of the Yemen’s Houthis (Ansar Allah) is not just a story of military conquest but also of ideological innovation, which has transformed northern Yemen and reshaped power relations in the Middle East. Despite their importance, the unanswered question of what the Houthis “really” want still looms large in academic debates and political circles. This project will transform our understanding of the Houthis by analysing their massive ideological output and triangulating it with a vast corpus of unexplored indigenous sources and findings from digital (remote) fieldwork. As the first study of its kind, this project pursues three primary objectives: (1) Provide unprecedented insights into Houthi ideology and its interplay with Yemen’s social, intellectual, historical, religious, and institutional frameworks, including its foreign inspirations, media, and symbolic and ritual expressions. (2) Explore Houthi ideology’s dual nature as both a normative discourse and an everyday practice, offering empirically informed understandings of how ideology operates and impacts local communities, and (3) use Houthi ideology as a case study to develop a novel “agential” and multiscalar theoretical approach to the study of ideology within social and cultural anthropology, and related fields.  The results of this project will redefine the anthropology of ideology and provide unparalleled insights into the Houthi phenomenon. Its innovative theoretical and methodological contributions will advance social and cultural anthropology, enhancing its relevance and providing novel approaches and tools for studying emerging ideologies in similar contexts globally. On a trans-disciplinary level, the results will inform and revise diplomatic, political, and humanitarian efforts to better understand the crisis in Yemen and develop tailored, sustainable solutions.

Mots-clés : yemen,anthropology of ideology,social history,intellectual history,houthis,zaydism,religion,governance
Projet ERC : ELEC_FROM_HEAT (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Luxembourg Institute of science and technology — Pays : Luxembourg — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LIST
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2359064.0 €

Electric energy stands for 20% of the total energy consumed in the world, and this share is expected to reach 40% by 2050 as an outcome of the need to decrease our dependence on non-renewable energies. Beyond sunlight and wind, heat is another formidable and poorly exploited source of electrical energy. Indeed, currently 72 % of the energy produced ends up in waste heat - and it has been predicted that up to 13 000 TWh could be recovered each year, which stands for Europe’s yearly total energy needs! In this context, my team recently showed that 40 grams of nonlinear pyroelectric ceramics can generate more than 10 Joules of electric energy from waste heat in one single thermodynamic cycle of 100 degrees. This is one order of magnitude larger than the closest state-of-the-art. We also demonstrated that these materials exhibit an energy efficiency of 40 % with respect to Carnot’s efficiency – which is beyond what photovoltaics and thermoelectrics can provide. Therefore, the scientific question of this project is the following: “Is it possible to generate Watts efficiently with this technology - and not only Joules?” Hence, the objective of this project is to show that energy harvesters made of nonlinear pyroelectric materials can generate 100 W of electric power from heat with 50 % energy efficiency. To do so, I will (1) design and fabricate environmentally friendly nonlinear pyroelectric harvesting modules, (2) analyse the fundamental role played by specific phase transitions on the heat-to-electricity thermodynamic conversion in such materials, (3) elaborate a power generator based on these harvesting modules with enhanced heat exchange capabilities able to generate 100 W of electricity from heat, and (4) prepare another specific heat-to-electricity generator showing that conversion efficiency can reach 50 %. This project will provide a compact, efficient, and low-cost technology to transform waste heat into a massive new source of electric energy.

Mots-clés : energy harvesting waste heat pyroelectric materials ferroelectric materials ceramics electroactive polymers electricity generation energy efficiency