Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : ANEUPLOIDY (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Rudjer Boskovic Institute — Pays : Croatie — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : RBI;IRB
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3833375.0 €

Chromosome segregation errors cause aneuploidy, a state of karyotype imbalance that accelerates tumor formation and impairs embryonic development. Even though mitotic errors have been studied extensively in cell cultures, the mechanisms generating various errors, their propagation and effects on genome integrity are not well understood. Moreover, very little is known about mitotic errors in complex tissues. The main goal of this project is to uncover the molecular origins of mitotic errors and their contribution to karyotype aberrations in healthy and diseased tissues. To achieve our goal, we have assembled an interdisciplinary team of experts in molecular and cell biology, cell biophysics, chromosomal instability in cancer, and theoretical physics. Our team will introduce novel approaches to study aneuploidy (superresolution microscopy, optogenetics, laser ablation, single cell karyotype sequencing) and apply them to state-of-the-art tissue cultures (mammalian organoids and tumoroids). In close collaboration, Tolić will establish assays to detect and quantify error types in cells, and Kops and Amon will use the assays on various healthy and cancer tissues. Tolić and Kops will uncover the molecular origins of errors, their propagation and impact on genome integrity, while Amon will lead the investigation of the mechanisms that ensure high chromosome segregation fidelity in healthy tissues. Interwoven in these collaborations are the efforts of Pavin, who will develop a theoretical model to describe the origin of errors and to quantitatively link chromosome segregation fidelity in single cells and tissues. Model and experiment will continuously inspire each other, to achieve deep understanding of how mitotic errors arise, how they propagate and how they impact on cell populations. Thus, the extensive sets of expertise present in our team will be combined and expanded with novel technologies to tackle the big challenge of the origins of aneuploidy in humans.

Mots-clés : chromosome segregation,aneuploidy,mitotic spindle,organoids,laser microsurgery,modeling
Projet ERC : ANEUPLOIDY (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : University Medical Center Utrecht — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UMC
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 168000.0 €

Chromosome segregation errors cause aneuploidy, a state of karyotype imbalance that accelerates tumor formation and impairs embryonic development. Even though mitotic errors have been studied extensively in cell cultures, the mechanisms generating various errors, their propagation and effects on genome integrity are not well understood. Moreover, very little is known about mitotic errors in complex tissues. The main goal of this project is to uncover the molecular origins of mitotic errors and their contribution to karyotype aberrations in healthy and diseased tissues. To achieve our goal, we have assembled an interdisciplinary team of experts in molecular and cell biology, cell biophysics, chromosomal instability in cancer, and theoretical physics. Our team will introduce novel approaches to study aneuploidy (superresolution microscopy, optogenetics, laser ablation, single cell karyotype sequencing) and apply them to state-of-the-art tissue cultures (mammalian organoids and tumoroids). In close collaboration, Tolić will establish assays to detect and quantify error types in cells, and Kops and Amon will use the assays on various healthy and cancer tissues. Tolić and Kops will uncover the molecular origins of errors, their propagation and impact on genome integrity, while Amon will lead the investigation of the mechanisms that ensure high chromosome segregation fidelity in healthy tissues. Interwoven in these collaborations are the efforts of Pavin, who will develop a theoretical model to describe the origin of errors and to quantitatively link chromosome segregation fidelity in single cells and tissues. Model and experiment will continuously inspire each other, to achieve deep understanding of how mitotic errors arise, how they propagate and how they impact on cell populations. Thus, the extensive sets of expertise present in our team will be combined and expanded with novel technologies to tackle the big challenge of the origins of aneuploidy in humans.

Mots-clés : chromosome segregation,aneuploidy,mitotic spindle,organoids,laser microsurgery,modeling
Projet ERC : RetroChrom (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and Immunotherapy
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 : 2500000.0 €

Chromosomes of eukaryotes adopt highly dynamic and complex hierarchical structures in the nucleus. The three-dimensional (3D) organization of chromosomes profoundly affects DNA functions, primarily transcription. During retroviral infection, histone-free viral DNA copy is synthesized from viral genomic RNA. vDNA will ultimately integrate into the host genome to ensure its maintenance and expression. Understanding retrovirus-host interactions at the genomic level, and the peculiar mechanisms by which lentiviruses, including HIV-1, and their related gene transfer vectors, are imported into the nucleus, loaded with nucleosomes, integrate in, and interact with, the human genome will provide valuable information about lentiviral replication and establish the basis for the development of safer and more efficacious lentiviral vectors for human gene therapy. Our objectives are: 1-To identify and characterize cellular proteins associated with the HIV-1 PIC, and determine their roles in nuclear import and/or integration. 2-To explore the role of the epigenome of unintegrated vDNA in HIV-1 gene expression from unintegrated and integrated vDNA. 3- To determine the impact of nuclear organization on integration site selection and on viral and host transcription. State of the art technologies will be applied to achieve these challenging objectives. If successful, this project will make an outstanding contributions not only to the field of HIV biology but also for the development of safe lentiviral vectors for gene therapy.

Mots-clés : nuclear import,epigenome,3d genome structure,integration sites selection,gene therapy
Projet ERC : ECHOES (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Groningen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : RUG
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1494040.99 €

Chronology is fundamental to all study of the past. Social and cultural change is incomprehensible without clear information on the ordering and duration of events. However, the exact chronology of the Old World only extends as far back as the mid-1st millennium BC, even though state-level societies in both the Western and the Eastern Hemispheres emerged several millennia before this time. In the New World, the situation is even worse, with none of the pre-Columbian societies currently fixed in calendrical time. No scientific method has so far been able to provide historians of early society with the levels of precision considered essential by their modern counterparts. Indeed, if the 20th century AD were dated at the same resolution as the 20th century BC, the two World Wars would be indistinguishable in time; and the Montgomery Bus Strike might post-date the release of Mandela. ECHOES pioneers the first technique capable of providing ancient history with the same clarity as modern history. The new approach is based on past solar events that initiated sudden increases in the atmospheric concentration of radiocarbon. The enriched concentrations would have been absorbed by all growing plants at the time. Crucially, fossil wood archives already exist in which the growth year of each tree-ring is exactly known, enabling the events to be easily dated. Moreover, the uplifts will also be present in all artefacts that were fashioned from contemporary plant material, such as papyrus documents. Matching the enrichments in such cultural items with the tree-ring archives will also date them to the exact year. ECHOES aims to produce a myriad of such connections to secure key early societies in calendrical time. This will lay the foundations for a globally synchronous, chronological lattice that will allow the flow of technology and ideas to be understood in a way that has never before been previously possible, as each cultural record will be fixed to the same time frame.
Projet ERC : DYNURBAN (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CEMFI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1292586.25 €

City growth is driven by a combination of systematic determinants and shocks. Random growth models predict realistic city size distributions but ignore, for instance, the strong empirical association between human capital and city growth. Models with systematic determinants predict degenerate size distributions. We will develop an integrated model that combines systematic and random determinants to explain the link between human capital, entrepreneurship and growth, while generating relevant city size distributions. We will calibrate the model to quantify the contribution of cities to aggregate growth. Urban growth also has a poorly understood spatial component. Combining gridded data of land use, population, businesses and roads for 3 decennial periods we will track the evolution of land use in the US with an unprecedented level of spatial detail. We will pay particular attention to the magnitude and causes of “slash-and-burn” development: instances when built-up land stops meeting needs in terms of use and intensity and, instead of being redeveloped, it is abandoned while previously open space is built up. Job-to-job flows across cities matter for efficiency and during the recent crisis they have plummeted. We will study them with individual social security data. Even if there have only been small changes in mismatch between unemployed workers and vacancies during the crisis, if workers shy away from moving to take a job in another city, misallocation can increase substantially. We will also study commuting flows for Spain and the UK based on anonymized cell phone location records. We will identify urban areas by iteratively aggregating municipalities if more than a given share of transit flows end in the rest of the urban area. We will also measure the extent to which people cross paths with others opening the possibility of personal interactions, and assess the extent to which this generates productivity-enhancing agglomeration economies.

Mots-clés : urban economics
Projet ERC : EU-JUSTICE (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Erasmus University Rotterdam — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : EUR
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Civil justice is under pressure. The proclaimed crisis in civil justice results from the ineffectiveness of procedures in terms of the long duration, high costs, and complexity. These undermine access to justice as guaranteed by the Human Rights Convention and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It is illustrative in this regard that 26% of the violation judgments concern undue delay of procedure. A well-functioning civil justice system is pivotal for enforcing rights for consumers and businesses and protecting fundamental rights. Civil justice is also increasingly valued for its contribution to economic growth as seen from the World Bank reports and the EU Justice Agenda for 2020. Key issues in the current efforts to bridge the access to justice gap at the EU and national level are digitalisation of procedures, privatisation of justice (ADR), an increased possibility of self-representation, and specialisation of courts and procedures. These trends are potentially ground-breaking in contributing to easier and cheaper access to courts and private forms of adjudication. However, a one-sided focus on procedural efficiency or competitive advantage may have repercussions for procedural justice and the inclusive quality of the civil justice system. The question is how these digitalisation, privatisation, self-representation, and specialisation trends influence access to justice in the selected Member States, and what the repercussions are for the emerging EU civil justice system. Using a unique combination of legal-normative, comparative law, and qualitative research, the project will (1) develop an urgently needed integrated approach to digitalisation, privatisation, self-representation, and specialisation; (2) scrutinise these against the background of strengthening access to justice as a fundamental right and as the pillar of civil justice in the EU; and (3) build on the foundation of EU civil justice, securing effective and equal access to justice for EU citizens.

Mots-clés : access to justice,civil procedure,eu civil justice,e justice,european consumer mediation,self representation,international commercial courts
Projet ERC : GOCART (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : UK Research and Innovation — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UKRI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 538343.75 €

Climate change driven by CO2 emissions from human activities is a significant challenge facing mankind. An important component of Earth’s carbon (C) cycle is the ocean’s biological C pump; without it atmospheric CO2 would be ~50% higher than it is now. The pump consists of sinking organic matter which is remineralised back into CO2 in the deep ocean. The depth at which remineralisation occurs is the main factor affecting the amount of organic C stored in the ocean. Currently we do not understand how or why remineralisation depth varies in time, which limits our ability to make robust predictions of how the future C cycle, and hence our climate, will change into the future. This is mainly due to the challenges of measuring remineralisation depth using conventional methods– a barrier which autonomous underwater vehicles are poised to overcome by providing high frequency data over long periods. This technological innovation will revolutionise our understanding of this important planetary C flux. I propose an ambitious project to address current uncertainties in remineralisation depth. GOCART encompasses new observations, obtained using cutting-edge technology and novel methodology, through to global climate modelling. Underwater glider deployments will be used to establish the characteristics and significance of temporal variability in organic C flux and remineralisation depth during the most dynamic period of the year. This will enable new insights into the factors driving variability in remineralisation depth, ultimately leading to development of a new model parameterisation incorporating temporal variability. Using an innovative modelling framework, this parameterisation will be tested for its potential to improve predictions of ocean C storage. GOCART represents a significant advance in quantifying temporal variability in remineralisation depth, which is key to reducing uncertainty in model predictions of ocean C storage, and yet currently almost entirely unknown.

Mots-clés : ocean carbon,biological carbon pump,remineralisation length scale,gliders,autonomous underwater vehicles,climate model
Projet ERC : TITANICA (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Ocean Atmosphere Systems (Germany) — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 125000.0 €

Climate change is triggering profound changes in the marine environment, especially in the Arctic Ocean (AO) and subpolar North Atlantic (SPNA), two key areas playing a crucial role in feeding the main engine of the global oceans: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Despite the utmost importance of AMOC for the climate system, there are still many open fundamental questions regarding its physical mechanisms, water mass pathways, and transport or ventilation timescales. TITANICA aims to improve our understanding of AMOC on the basis of a new set of transient radionuclide tracers (129I, 236U, 39Ar and 14C), a quartet that will allow to study and constrain oceanographic processes on timescales of years to millennia. While the combination of the two nuclear reprocessing-derived 129I and 236U will investigate the shorter transport mechanisms (<100 y) of Atlantic waters in the AO and deep-water convection in the SPNA, the natural 39Ar and 14C will provide answers for the ventilation of intermediate and deep waters (>100 y). Newly available techniques will allow the implementation of 39Ar to unprecedented possibilities, closing the time gap between the artificial transient tracers (CFCs, SF6, 129I, 236U) and natural 14C. TITANICA goes beyond the state-of-the art as it combines cutting-edge analytical techniques (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry and Atom Trap Trace Analysis) with novel data analysis methods pioneered by the PI and supported by binary mixing models, transit time distributions, and regional ocean modeling. During the 5 years journey of TITANICA, two PhD students and two postdocs will join the PI embarking in a suit of ocean expeditions covering the Arctic Ocean, the SPNA and the subtropical Atlantic Ocean. The new data generated and the strong collaboration with European and International partners will combine with the PI unique expertise in this field, triggering a new era of transient tracers in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.

Mots-clés : transient tracers,atta,arctic,subpolar north atlantic,deep water formation,circulation
Projet ERC : PRD-Trigger (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
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 : 1491330.0 €

Climate change leads to increasing weathering cycles on landscapes and the built environment. Promotion of alternative energy sources such as geothermal energy intensifies cyclic perturbations of the underground environment. Both lead to precipitation-dissolution cycles of salts, natural constituents of brines present inside porous rock. When precipitation occurs inside the pores, stresses build up which eventually crack the material. This might be a positive outcome, e.g., increasing the production rate of a geothermal reservoir, or on the contrary, be the cause of severe deterioration of natural building stones and coastal erosion. What is the actual trigger for the dynamic response of a rock when precipitation occurs, and can we ultimately control this trigger? The answer lies at the meso-scale, i.e. the scale of the pore network, where precipitation-dissolution reactions, geometry changes and flow and transport properties changes meet. These reactions and changes are strongly coupled, but their respective importance for the resulting rock dynamics is unclear. A combined experimental-modelling approach will be developed, comprising: (1) 4D X-ray micro-tomographic experiments providing new insights in the correlations between transport-precipitation-deformation processes inside rock; (2) a virtual simulator for precipitation-triggered rock dynamics based on a unified phase-field description; (3) a model-based image analysis approach, combining the simulator and the experimental dataset through a Bayesian framework for properties and constitutive model identification and hierarchization. This hierarchization will pinpoint the governing trigger(s). By acting on the trigger, controlled precipitation-induced cracking and crack healing will be demonstrated on core-scale rocks. The new experimental-modelling toolset will open new ways for improving building stones’ durability, cultural heritage and coastal protection, and geoengineering of the subsurface.

Mots-clés : rock weathering,in pore precipitation,salt damage,4d x ray micro tomography,pore scale modelling,bayesian identification
Projet ERC : AWACA (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 4232395.0 €

Climate models predict that precipitation will increase in Antarctica, which will moderate global sea-level rise. Meanwhile, the isotopic composition of snowfall records climate parameters which can be recovered in ice cores. However, there are still major gaps in our understanding of the atmospheric water cycle over Antarctica. For the first time, the AWACA project will provide a consistent and comprehensive combined observation and modeling framework to understand and predict the fate of atmospheric water all along the tropospheric column. Specifically adapted/designed instruments will be combined to form observation platforms deployed at 5 sites along a 1100 km coast-to-plateau transect aligned with the typical moisture-carrying air mass trajectories. The challenges of working in full autonomy in Antarctica, never addressed to such an extent before, will be tackled by collaborating with experts in polar technology and logistics. The resulting data set will make possible the study of the processes driving the water fluxes and composition to an unprecedented level, and the gained insights will be a strong basis to develop new physics parameterizations for regional and climate models. Once validated along the transect but also in other regions of Antarctica thanks to satellite observations and past campaigns, those models will enable us to decipher the past and future variability of the atmospheric water cycle over Antarctica.

Mots-clés : remote sensing,paleoclimatology,climate projection,cloud and precipitation observation and microphysics,water vapor,antarctica,surface flux,blowing snow