Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Role of actin-based contraction and scaffolding in hepatocyte polarization, generation of liver-specific microarchitecture and liver tissue functioning (LIVER)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Germany
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2014-07-01
End date: 2016-06-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 161968.8
EU funding (EUR): 161968.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Failure of liver functioning affects millions of people around the world. Despite of this and its known ability to regenerate itself, surprisingly little is understood about the mechanisms guiding both liver regeneration and functioning. A key element in providing liver functionality is the presence of specific cells in the tissue, but also their correct arrangement there. This distinct microarchitecture relies on the correct polarization of cells, e.g. the hepatocytes. The hepatocyte polarization involves the formation of several restricted apical domains per cell, which together create the bile canalicular (BC) network, an essential component for bile secretion and overall liver function. This peculiar structure is currently collecting increasing attention as comprehension of these events will help to understand conditions that cause liver diseases. As actin remodelling and contraction has been associated with both generation of polarity and organ development, this project will address how actin-based contraction and specific actin-scaffolding/regulating proteins affect the formation of hepatocyte apical domains and BC. Using RNAi and inhibition of the activity of specific proteins (e.g. myosin), confocal microscopy and accompanying high-thoughput image analysis this project aims at identifying key proteins of the actin machinery (e.g. scaffolding and contraction) required for the formation of hepatocyte polarity and the characteristic BC network both in vitro and in vivo. This study will describe how specific molecular components of the actin machinery affect the mechanisms of tissue generation and function, bridging the molecular and cell biology data with the anatomy and physiology of the liver organ. Furthermore, these data will be used by the host collaborators in the Virtual Liver Network project for the development of a large-scale model describing liver functioning from subcellular to tissue to organ levels, which may become clinically relevant.

Keywords: l107 structural biology,l301 morphology and functional imaging of cells,l307 cell signalling and cellular interactions
Identification of whether, in which aspects and by which function, a RNA binding protein, KH-type splicing regulatory protein governs development and function of B cell, a type of white blood cell (3W-RGB)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: International Incoming Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IIF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-07-01
End date: 2015-06-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 299558.4
EU funding (EUR): 299558.4
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The immune system is a biological defence against diseases including virus and bacterial infections. A type of white blood cell, B cell, is causative for production of antibodies, key effectors to identify and neutralize viruses or bacteria. B cell can produce high affinity antibodies rapidly upon re-exposure to the same infectious agent, making B cell a key player for immunological memory, a principle of vaccination. Thus, full understanding on B cell biology is crucial for improvement of vaccination as well as prevention of B cell-diseases including B cell-cancers, immunodeficiency, a malfunction of immune system, and autoimmunity caused by aberrant immune response against its own cells and tissues. Recent discovery of microRNAs (miR)s, short RNAs promoting mRNA decay, has highlighted the importance of the regulation of mRNA decay in B cell development and function. Especially, miR-155 has been identified as an essential regulator for antibody production and its biogenesis appears to be mediated by a RNA-binding protein (RBP), KH-type splicing regulatory protein (KSRP). KSRP is a versatile protein with abilities to facilitate miR generation, mRNA decay and splicing, a modification process of newly generated pre-mRNA, and it has been suggested that KSRP controls several key genes related to B cell functions. Thus, we propose that KSRP is an important gene regulator of B cell biology. The aim of this proposal is to identify Whether, in Which aspects and by Which function, the RBP, KSRP, Governs B cell development and function in B cell-intrinsic manner. To achieve this aim, we will perform phenotypic analysis using a unique mouse model system lacking KSRP gene expression. Bioinformatic analysis will allow identifying the genes that KSRP regulates in the context of observed phenotype. The results can generate new insights for gene regulation mechanisms in B cell biology and aid to pave a way for improvement of vaccination and novel treatments for B cell-diseases.

Keywords: l606 immunogenetics,l602 adaptive immunity,post-transcriptional regulation,mirna,rna-binding protein,kh-type splicing regulatory protein,b cell,differentiation,germinal centre,vaccination
Grammar and memory: Evidence from agrammatic aphasia and probable Alzheimer's disease in German, Italian and Greek (MEMOGRAM)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Germany
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-09-01
End date: 2015-08-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 216952.8
EU funding (EUR): 216952.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

In Europe, there is an increasing number of people with neurological problems, such as probable Alzheimer’s disease (pAD) or aphasia, which often result in severe language and memory impairments. It has been argued that memory deficits contribute to the language problems brain-damaged populations face and, further, can predict these populations’ patterns of linguistic impairment. Interestingly, working (and perhaps semantic) memory deficits appear to differentially affect functional categories, resulting in a selective breakdown of grammar. However, there is no consensus as to the source of memory related processing difficulties for certain categories. The proposed study will investigate the relation between grammar and memory focusing on agrammatic aphasia (AA) and pAD in three morphologically rich European languages: German, Italian, and Greek. It will explore the ability of AA and pAD speakers to process functional categories which have different properties across and within these languages by means of on-line and off-line constrained tasks. The categories that will be tested are: Mood, Tense, Negation, subject-verb Agreement, gender Agreement and structural Case. Independent assessment of participants’ memory function will be made as well. The main goal of the project is to shed light on the precise relation between grammar and memory, detecting the factors that contribute to the processing load of a given category. The project will also have clinical implications: based on its "basic research results", new treatment programmes for German-, Italian-, and Greek-speaking AA and pAD individuals will be developed. This project is highly interdisciplinary as it combines methods of theoretical linguistics, psycho-/neurolinguistics, cognitive and clinical (neuro)psychology, and speech and language therapy. It will contribute to the excellence of Europe in cognition and related disorders, as well as to a better treatment of populations suffering from AA or pAD.

Keywords: aphasia,alzheimer's disease,memory,(morpho)syntactic impairments,functional categories,tense,subject-verb agreement,gender agreement,negation,case,mood,german,italian,greek
Climate change and sea turtles (SEATURTLES)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: International Incoming Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Spain
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IIF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-06-01
End date: 2015-05-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 223002.2
EU funding (EUR): 223002.2
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Climate change is impacting ecosystems and organisms around the world. Sea turtles bury their eggs in sand and need stable conditions of moisture and temperature for successful development of eggs and emergence of hatchlings to the surface. We have recently shown that leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) are susceptible to climate change in Central America, because of the effects of precipitation and air temperature on egg development and hatchling emergence. We propose to analyze the global effects of climatic conditions on sea turtle populations and project their responses to climate change throughout the 21st century. We will look at the effects of climate variability and climate change on the hatchling output and model population projections at various nesting sites around the world to assess global responses of sea turtles to climate change. We expect that our findings will contribute to the understanding of the effects of climate change on biodiversity. The outcomes of the study will be important for Europe's leading role in climate change research.

Keywords: v107 population dynamics,v201 climatology and climate change,v305 ecology,v304 conservation biology - ecology - genetics,v308 population biology,v301 animal behaviour,v306 environmen
Endoglin-Mediated Vascular Regeneration to Promote Heart Repair (VASC-GEN)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-06-01
End date: 2015-05-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 231283.2
EU funding (EUR): 231283.2
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The standard emergency treatment for myocardial infarction (MI) has so improved over the last decade that most patients survive. However, many of these patients still go on to develop heart failure over the subsequent months and years. Vascular regeneration using autologous cells, if given at an early stage in patient treatment, can promote cardiac repair following MI and reduce the adverse cardiac remodelling that leads to heart failure. However, clinical trials have clearly shown that currently available therapies provide only minor improvement in heart function and require significant refinement before they become a useful clinical treatment. Further basic research is urgently required to advance these vascular regeneration therapies to improve patient outcomes. This project builds on the recent finding that cardiac stem cell populations expressing the TGFbeta/BMP co-receptor endoglin promotes angiogenesis in the myocardial infarct region with greater efficiency than endoglin-depleted cells. As donor cells are rarely retained after stem cell transfer to the heart, this finding strongly suggests that endoglin-positive cardiac stem cells have a pro-angiogenic secretome, that is lost in the absence of endoglin. This project will take advantage of this discovery and will use mouse models of acute MI to determine the most potent combinations of pro-angiogenic protein factors that lead to cardiac vascular regeneration in vivo. By developing optimal conditions for therapeutic angiogenesis we anticipate being able to significantly reduce myocyte loss following acute MI and decrease the risk of subsequent heart failure.

Keywords: l203 proteomics,l407 cardiovascular diseases,l312 stem cell biology,angiogenesis,cardiac magnetic resonance imaging
ATR7, a novel player of oxidative stress tolerance in plants: interrogation of its mode of action through an integrative omics approach (PLANTSURVIVOR)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Germany
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-06-01
End date: 2015-05-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 223778.4
EU funding (EUR): 223778.4
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are important modulators of plant development and they accumulate in tissues upon various kinds of abiotic stresses imposed by e.g. elevated temperature or drought. ROS are also intimately linked to programmed cell death (PCD). Cellular ROS activity is controlled by a large cohort of ROS forming and scavenging enzymes, signalling proteins and transcription factors that together constitute an intricate ROS functionality network that balances growth against the negative impact of environmental stress. A detailed understanding of plant ROS biology is thus of great agronomic importance. Previously, a novel mutant, called atr7, was isolated from Arabidopsis thaliana and shown to display a remarkable tolerance to oxidative stress-inducing agents such as paraquat or the catalase inhibitor aminotriazole. The ATR7 gene has been isolated recently, however knowledge about the function of its encoded protein, its mode of action, cellular localization, and its potential interaction partners remains very limited so far. In addition, virtually nothing is known about the cellular and stress-specific expression patterns of ATR7 or its integration into signalling networks. The project therefore aims at unravelling the biological role of ATR7. To this end, transgenic plants with altered ATR7 expression levels (knockout, amiRNA and overexpressor lines) will be grown under normal and oxidative stress-eliciting conditions and subjected to comprehensive analyses (including transcriptomics and metabolomics, and others) to identify genes, metabolites, and biochemical pathways likely to be responsible for the acquisition of stress tolerance. An important part of the project will be training of the researcher in modern genomics and metabolomics methods on state-of-the-art instruments available at the host institution. The researcher will then utilize the know-how and practical experience at the newly established Genomics Research Center at his home institution.

Keywords: oxidative stress,programmed cell death,genomics,metabolomics,reactive oxygen species
Early Modern Private Partnerships and Company Law in the Meuse-Rhine Region. (PRIPAR)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-04-01
End date: 2015-03-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 175974.6
EU funding (EUR): 175974.6
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The proposed project is designed to serve the most fundamental aim of the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship, i.e. the development of the career of the applicant. In the concrete, the fellowship as well as the proposed research will enable the applicant to prepare himself for the position of full professor of comparative legal history of the Meuse-Rhine region at the Law Faculty of Maastricht University (Netherlands). Therefore, the proposed research is designed to reach two overall objectives that are inextricably bound up with reaching the aforementioned position of professional maturity in the medium-term: (1) the enhancement of the applicant’s expertise on the historical development of law in the Meuse-Rhine region, and (2) the improvement of the applicant’s international renown as a scholar. As a result, the applicant will improve his future career prospects in the most efficient way possible while contributing largely to the excellence and competitiveness of the European Research Area (ERA). In order to meet the first objective, the applicant will study the organisational structure and legal aspects of early modern private partnerships in the cities of Maastricht, Liège and Aachen. By identifying the various types of private partnerships within the region, supplemented by a reconstruction of actual corporate practices applied by merchants and craftsmen in the respective cities, the applicant will not only improve his expertise on the comparative legal history of the Meuse-Rhine region, but he will also adjust our currently distorted understanding of companies and company law in the early modern period. In order to meet the second objective, i.e. the enhancement of his renown as an international scholar, the applicant will interpret the results of his archival research in the light of internationally, heavily debated topics as there are the myth of the customary law merchant and the origins of early modern capitalism.

Keywords: s110 legal systems - constitutions - foundations of law,s410 social - economic - cultural and political historylegal history,company law,commercial companies,economic history,early modern period
Continuity and changes in textile production in Early Bronze Age Greece (GREEK TEXTILE TOOLS)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Denmark
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-08-01
End date: 2017-06-02
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 308587.8
EU funding (EUR): 308587.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

This project will provide new insights into the development and importance of textile production techniques in Greece in the Early Bronze Age (EBA). During this period basic cultural features of the later Minoan and Mycenaean civilisations were determined, yet the impact of textile production in this process has never been investigated. Despite the fact that EBA Greece developed significant links with Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, their impact on textile production and technical development throughout the 3rd Millennium BC is yet to be studied. A systematic analysis of textile tools, their first appearance and distribution patterns will be the project’s point of departure. Full sets of EBA textile tools will be tested experimentally at the Centre of Textile Research in Copenhagen and evaluated with an international team of textile researchers in order to understand the manufacturing techniques and to identify the types of threads used (animal vs. plant). My objectives are 1. to examine the rate of development of textile techniques; 2. to elucidate the role of textiles in the long debated cultural change at the end of the EBA; 3. to integrate theoretical and practical studies on textile tools in order to develop new ways of interpreting archaeological data; 4. to address social and economic issues by analysing contextual evidence from settlements with implications to functional zones and the status of textile production. This project will be carried out through collaboration with numerous sites and research institutions in Greece, Germany and Denmark. The expected major accomplishments will be 1. a far greater understanding of the development of textile production in EBA Greece and the impact of its contacts with Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean; 2. the evaluation of analytical methods and experiments to understand the function of the textile tools and 3. the integration of these new results into a more robust archaeological reconstruction of EBA Greece.

Keywords: prehistory,archaeology,textiles,textile tools,early bronze age,early helladic,greece,aegean,eastern mediterranean,cultural changes,society,craftsmanship,spindle whorl,loom weight
Fluorescence-Based Optimisation Of Sewage Treatment (FLUORO-BOOST)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-11-01
End date: 2015-10-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 231283.2
EU funding (EUR): 231283.2
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The aim of this innovative Fellowship is to provide the water industry with a robust yet straightforward technique, based on novel developments in the field of fluorescence spectroscopy, to optimize wastewater treatment works performance, to reduce energy consumption and to monitor final effluent quality in real time. The treatment of wastewater is an energy-intensive operation. The largest energy usage in wastewater treatment is found in the aeration of settled sewage in the activated sludge process (ASP) which, in isolation, contributes to over half of the energy costs associated with wastewater treatment. Currently, the process is monitored by dissolved oxygen or ammonia probes, but performance of these probes is variable and affected by location and hostile conditions in the plant. Consequently, water utilities often over-aerate in order to achieve compliance with final effluent standards. Therefore, there is a need to optimize the management of ASPs and, specifically, to optimize aeration control in order to minimize energy consumption whilst maintaining final effluent compliance. We will quantify the relationships between the fluorescence of wastewater at several stages of treatment and standard parameters (biological oxygen demand and chemical oxygen demand) in the laboratory and at full scale. We will apply these relationships to the real-time operation of wastewater treatment works to provide a real-time control system. Meeting the project aim will deliver an appropriate technology, requiring minimal operator training, which will improve control of the ASP and minimise over-aeration, thereby offering tangible environmental and financial benefits and assisting the industry in meeting the requirements of the EU Water Framework Directive.

Keywords: wastewater treatment,activated sludge plants,fluorescence spectroscopy,dissolved organic matter,real-time monitoring,protein-like fluorescence,energy