Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : RACER (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HGF
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1324314.0 €

Lithium-ion batteries are the state-of-the-art electrochemical energy storage technology, sodium-ion batteries are about to become commercial, and potassium-ion batteries are attracting rapidly increasing interest. All these alkali-ion battery (AIB) technologies, especially the already or soon-to-be commercialized battery chemistries, have one common characteristic making them so successful – the use of insertion-type electrode materials. These materials provide sufficient space in their crystal structure for the alkali ions to be reversibly inserted, without causing substantial (irreversible) rearrangement. However, the fact that the ions can only occupy specific sites in the host lattice intrinsically limits the amount of ions that can be reversibly inserted. The aim of this project is the development of a new family of electrode materials for AIBs, which is characterized by an innovative storage mechanism. This mechanism combines the benefits of a stable insertion-type host structure with an extended redox activity and additional available space for the alkali-ion charge carriers resulting from the introduction of carefully selected atomic redox centres (ARCs). Based on own preliminary results and new yet to be developed suitable host matrices and ARCs, and their comprehensive investigation by highly complementary ex/in situ and operando characterization techniques to gain an in-depth understanding of this new mechanism, we will develop specific guidelines and design criteria for the realization of such novel materials. These criteria and guidelines will be effectively evaluated by designing new materials which benefit of this new charge storage mechanism and, thus, enable long-term stable insertion-type AIBs with enhanced energy and power densities. Moreover, the results obtained will allow for an improved understanding of the redox behaviour of the highly active ARCs at the atomic level – a field of research that has been limited to theoretical studies so far

Mots-clés : electrochemical energy storage battery novel charge storage mechanism
Projet ERC : olfACTION (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UKE
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Sensory information is initially processed in specialized brain areas but only integration with previously acquired knowledge provides meaningful information for flexible action selection. This requires the propagation of information from sensory to association areas, where sensory information is put into context and memories are acquired. The entorhinal-hippocampal network is of particular importance for information integration and memory formation. Recent findings about learning-induced changes in sensory areas raise the question whether they occur independently or reflect altered top-down influence of the abundant feedback projections from associative areas. While learning- and context-related changes of activity have been described for individual brain areas, it is largely unknown how learning affects propagation of information between areas. The proposed project aims to dissect the mechanisms by which learning and context shape propagation of sensory information from the olfactory system to the entorhinal-hippocampal network in mice. Olfaction provides unique features to address this aim: a short pathway from sensory to association areas, a discrete time frame for information sampling by respiration, and the capability of mice to quickly learn odor-guided tasks. The main hypothesis of this project is that timing and synchrony of neuronal activity are key parameters in determining the propagation of information between brain areas and that they are affected by learning and context through feedback projections from association areas. This hypothesis will be tested by simultaneous electrophysiological recordings in olfactory bulb, piriform cortex, lateral entorhinal cortex, and hippocampus during learning of odor-reward associations, combined with optogenetic manipulations and anatomical assessment of connectivity between these areas. This project will reveal the mechanisms by which learning- and context change the propagation of information between brain areas.

Mots-clés : population activity,large scale networks,synchrony,olfaction,entorhinal cortex,hippocampus
Projet ERC : LEXSYN (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UKE
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2037356.0 €

The extreme length and small caliber of neuronal processes entail complex local regulation of protein turnover. In light of the high metabolic demand and dynamic protein exchange imposed by synaptic neurotransmission, several surveillance mechanisms should be in place to sense protein damage that will otherwise cause synaptic dysfunction. However, it is still essentially unclear how local control of the metastable proteome, whose proteins have a high copy number and are crucial for synaptic function, is accomplished in dendrites to prevent formation of toxic aggregates. My previous work suggests that neuronal activity drives lysosomal fusion with the plasma membrane and exocytotic release of supersaturated, aggregation-prone proteins. The deposition of these proteins in the interstitial space likely feeds into the glymphatic system and cleaning routines associated with the enhanced circulation of cerebrospinal fluid during sleep. Intriguingly, I could show that, the concomitant release of lysosomal proteases enables growth of spine synapses suggesting that lysosomal exocytosis might serve both, protein removal and synaptic plasticity, whereas the latter might be an inevitable consequence of the necessity for local disposal of aggregation-prone proteins. Building on my expertise in synapse biology and advanced imaging, the LEXSYN project aims to characterize the secretome of exocytotic lysosomes and to understand the consequences of dendritic lysosomal fusion for synaptic plasticity. I will decipher physiological signals regulating lysosomal exocytosis and investigate the pathological consequences of lysosomal fusion impairment, thereby assessing its relevance in neurodegenerative diseases. To achieve these ambitious goals, I will develop new tools for monitoring and manipulation of dendritic lysosomal exocytosis in vivo. I expect to reveal mechanisms of fundamental relevance for the control of the metastable proteome and its contribution to neurodegeneration.

Mots-clés : synapse,structural plasticity,lysosomal exocytosis,chaperone mediated autophagy,metastable proteome
Projet ERC : US-ACT (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Université de technologie d'Eindhoven — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1812500.0 €

Ultrasound (US) can revolutionize and democratize medical imaging if it offers: (1) access for everyone, and (2) excellent Image Quality (IQ). MRI offers (2) but is expensive and will thus not likely be able to provide (1). Low-cost US hardware technology will enable (1) in the future but is not expected to yield the needed breakthrough for (2). Consequently, any paradigm-shifting advance in signal processing technology that achieves US with excellent IQ will have a huge impact.  I propose a conceptually new and highly-unconventional approach that I believe can lead to a new generation of US technologies with excellent IQ. I will formally describe US systems as intelligent autonomous agents that perform actions and perception using probabilistic inference: the action is the acquisition, probing the world, and the perception is the reconstruction that infers what anatomy most likely generated the acquired US data. I conclude that current US systems are in essence flawed agents since (1) actions are not driven by perception, i.e. the perception-action loop is broken, and (2) their generative perception models are naive. My proposal will address this by closing the perception-action loop and offering strong perception models based on advanced deep generative networks. This breaks a fundamental tenet in US imaging, where I put forth the important concept that the acquisition and perception should work together to identify the point on the low-dimensional manifold of pure anatomy (described by the generative model) that is being imaged.  My intelligent US agents will pursue excellent IQ under the heading of a single probabilistic principle: minimization of ``surprise’’ under the agent’s own prior belief (the generative model) that such high-quality images can indeed be achieved. With this, we open a new frontier within active imaging (in US and beyond) where data acquisition and information processing are treated jointly based on expressive generative density functions.

Mots-clés : ultrasound imaging,beamforming,signal processing,neural network ultrasound beamforming,deep algorithm unrolling,speckle reduction neural networks,active acquisition imaging,machine learning
Projet ERC : SYMPZON (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université de technologie d'Eindhoven — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499309.0 €

Our lives are profoundly affected by the digitization of data, and the amount of sensitive data that is shared on cloud storage grows considerably every day. Whenever sensitive data is collected, manipulated, exchanged, analyzed, and retained, symmetric cryptography is used.  The most commonly used and famous symmetric cryptography algorithms are AES and Keccak/SHA-3. Due to their importance, the entire research community focuses its attention on such schemes, with the result that the great majority of the symmetric primitives recently published resemble them. While positive at first glance, the limits of this approach and of the current state of the art are appearing in several contexts. First, the similarity of such schemes caused a performance flatness, with no substantial improvement recently achieved. Next, our understanding of their security has not fundamentally improved in the course of the last years, since their security arguments are still based on unverified and often false assumptions. Finally, and more importantly, the current bit-oriented schemes are *not* suitable for rising applications of practical importance such as Format Preserving Encryption, Multi-Party Computation, Fully Homomorphic Encryption, and Zero-Knowledge, which naturally operate over prime fields and/or integer rings.  The only way we can overcome these fundamental problems is by considering non-standard innovative approaches for designing secure and efficient symmetric primitives. Within the SYMPZON project, I plan to reshape the whole process of designing symmetric primitives by - developing design strategies for defeating attacks against symmetric primitives that mainly operate over integer rings; - constructing new cryptographic components over integer rings that admit an efficient bit-representation. This will lead to revolutionary symmetric primitives dedicated to targeting the rising number of applications operating over rings, with unprecedent security arguments and performances.

Mots-clés : symmetric cryptography cryptanalysis format preserving encryption mpc fhe zk friendly symmetric schemes
Projet ERC : ReMVeC (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : University Hospital Heidelberg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499581.0 €

The malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for more than 200 million cases and 400.000 deaths each year, with over 90% of cases occurring in Africa. The parasite is reliant upon Anopheline mosquitoes for transmission and insecticide treated bed nets targeting these mosquitoes represent the single most efficacious way to reduce case numbers and hence deaths. However, due to the use of pyrethroid insecticides on all distributed insecticide treated bed nets, insecticide resistance now threatens the impact of these interventions. Analogously, deaths from active malaria cases have been decreasing through the successful use of drug therapy; however, resistance to every class of front-line drug has now been described. Incredibly, we simply do not know the impact of current vector control tools on parasite development nor the impact of drug resistance on development within the mosquito vector, despite fine scale characterisation in the erythrocytic stages. With the stalling of progress in malaria elimination and the addition of new chemistries to insecticide treated bed nets, it is time that we invested in understanding precisely how our current vector control tools affect the parasite in order to avoid catastrophic failure of malaria control. To this end, I propose to: (i) Determine the impact of insecticide use on parasite development in the contexts of species replacement, insecticide resistance and insecticide exposure; (ii) Elucidate the changes due to parasite drug resistance on mosquito-stage development; (iii) Ascertain genetic interplay between mosquito immunity and response to insecticides to identify new targets that negatively affect insecticide resistance and parasite development. The results generated from this multidisciplinary proposal will redefine our understanding of factors determining vector competence under contemporary transmission settings and will identify alternative options for intervention.

Mots-clés : insecticide resistance,anopheles,plasmodium,drug resistance
Projet ERC : PlasmoArp (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and I mmunotherapy
Entité participante : University Hospital Heidelberg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499527.0 €

The malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites often use highly divergent proteins to regulate fundamental biological processes, such as sexual replication in the mosquito. Therefore, the molecular and cellular biology underlying parasite development is often little understood, especially during the mosquito stages, a major bottleneck in the Plasmodium life cycle. Recently, I identified an unconventional, Plasmodium-specific actin-related protein 2/3 (Arp2/3) complex that mediates DNA segregation during male gamete formation and is essential for development of the main replicative mosquito stage, the oocyst. Understanding the regulation and function of this structurally and functionally divergent actin nucleator could provide targets for new antimalarial strategies. Here, I propose to elucidate the molecular mechanism of the Plasmodium Arp2/3 complex on three levels: (1) I will uncover how Arp2/3 is activated during gamete formation, revealing the likely unusual mode of regulation of this complex. (2) I will explore the hypothesis that Arp2/3 is linked to a cryptic spindle assembly checkpoint, a mitosis regulator so far thought to be absent in Plasmodium. (3) I will reveal why Arp2/3-deficient parasites arrest in oocysts, which will shed light on the unusual cell division mode of this elusive stage. To address these ambitious aims, I will combine molecular biology methods, single cell transcriptomics and imaging, and I will engineer a new genetic tool to dissect gene function specifically in the oocyst, a stage that is notoriously difficult to study. PlasmoArp will thus not only give insight into the molecular biology of Plasmodium development in the mosquito and advance our understanding of Arp2/3 and actin biology across the eukaryotic kingdom, but it will also expand the toolbox to study the neglected oocyst. As Plasmodium Arp2/3 is essential for malaria transmission, this research will pave the way for new intervention strategies to mitigate malaria infections.

Mots-clés : plasmodium mosquito stages gametogenesis mitotic dna segregation actin related protein 2 3 complex
Projet ERC : RESIST (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Helmholtz Zentrum München — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : HMGU
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 250158.5 €

Providing food security in the face of climate change and increasingly frequent extreme heat and drought events is one of the greatest global challenges. Drought is the most influential environmental factor limiting crop yields for a growing world population and leading to significant economic losses. To safeguard agricultural production, it is crucial to develop high-yielding crops with improved water use efficiency. Oat (Avena sativa L.) is an emerging crop that offers significant benefits for human health and provides a nutrient-rich plant-based protein source with a low carbon footprint. However, oats are sensitive to drought and progress in breeding drought-resistant varieties, while urgently needed, is limited. The oat genome is characterised by its enormous size, high repeat content, and complex polyploid structure. Therefore, efforts to investigate complex agricultural traits such as drought stress resistance have long been hampered by the lack of genomics resources. Recently, a fully annotated reference genome sequence of Avena sativa became available, to which I contributed significantly, representing a fundamental breakthrough. RESIST will take on the challenging high-priority task of deciphering the molecular basis of drought stress resistance in oat, providing substantial solutions to secure yields of this emerging, healthy and versatile crop. To this end, RESIST will exploit innovations in plant genomics and in particular oat genetics, employ cutting-edge high-throughput phenotyping methods and establish gene editing protocols that provide an innovative basis for accelerated and targeted breeding of oats. RESIST provides the indispensable foundation for the development of better-performing oat varieties under drought conditions to secure oat yields as a sustainable source of a highly nutritious, healthy, protein-rich plant-based diet for billions of people.

Mots-clés : drought,oat,cereals,health,breeding barriers,gwas,phenotyping,genomics,comparative genomics,pangenomics,computational biology,transcriptomics,gene editing
Projet ERC : SAMIR (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1902435.5 €

The impact of climate change is the largest in polar regions, due to multiple feedback loops leading to polar amplification. In Antarctica, short meteorological time series hamper our ability to evaluate the climate variability at interannual and decadal scale, and in particular the one linked with the anthropogenic climate change. It is also not clear though whether climate variability in polar region will increase, despite significant consequences on the global climate system. In this proposal, I will evaluate how climate variability in Antarctica varies for changing climatic conditions, using ice core isotopic composition (δ18O, d-excess and 17O-excess). The objectives of this project are to study the climate variability thanks to a large network of ice core records at high resolution and high precision. A large number of ice cores are available through large European projects (Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice (BE-OI), EAIIST, …) but the analytical platform to measure all this ice at high precision is missing. By implementing the new generation of infrared spectrometer in an ice core measuring line, we will be able to increase both the throughput and precision, and measure triple isotopic composition on a large number of cores and resolve the climate variability in Antarctica.
Projet ERC : LAKE-SWITCH (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1494788.0 €

Chemical weathering is a central biogeochemical process that shapes the Earth’s Critical Zone (CZ), regulates the global carbon cycle and sets the pace for nutrient delivery to soils and ecosystems. Most knowledge on the rates and controls on chemical weathering are from laboratory experiments and from the short-term observation of modern soil and river systems. In contrast, little is known about past changes of chemical weathering over hundreds to thousands of years, which limits our understanding of how long-lasting human-climate-ecosystem interactions have impacted the CZ trajectories. Because of this knowledge gap, it is not possible to fully understand the response and feedbacks of the CZ to the climatic and environmental perturbations of the Holocene period, nor to predict their future evolution during the Anthropocene. To fill this gap, LAKE-SWITCH aims to produce new quantitative weathering records over 10^2-10^4 year timescales, with a temporal focus on the Holocene period. There are 3 main challenges: 1) developing quantitative proxies of chemical weathering, 2) calibrating these proxies for paleo-reconstructions, 3) measuring these proxies in paleo-archives of 10^2-10^4 year timescale integration. To provide these records, we will measure lithium and strontium isotopic proxies in lake detrital and authigenic – carbonates and biogenic silica – sediment archives. To calibrate these proxies and archives, we will use a source-to-sink approach and track weathering product pathways from soils, through rivers, to lake deposits. Then we will apply these proxies back in time in Holocene lake cores. As rapidly-eroding mountain dominate the global chemical erosion budget, we will focus on the study of the European Alps. New data from Alpine watersheds and lake records spanning gradients in erosion, runoff and land use will serve to quantify and model the impact of climate and human drivers on soil trajectories from the onset of the Holocene to the Anthropocene.

Mots-clés : critical zone,chemical weathering,lake records,holocene,carbonates