Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Programmable Droplet-based Lab on a Chip Systems (PDB-LOCS)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Türkiye
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG, 2012)
Start date: 2012-09-01
End date: 2016-08-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

Microfluidic systems offer great benefits in healthcare technologies such as reduction in reagent volume, high sensitivity, cost-efficiency and on-chip integration of multiple analyses. These benefits can be further enhanced using two phase flow microfluidic systems, i.e. microdroplet-based devices. The objective of this proposal is to develop programmable droplet-based lab-on-a-chip systems (PDB-LOCs) for tests/assays requiring high throughput and flexibility. The programmable platform will be a universal lab-on-a-chip device that can be used for multiple biochemical tests requiring different process steps. This will be achieved by routing microdroplets in a microfluidic network using electric field. At every junction at the fluidic network, droplets will be detected by capacitive sensing and will be routed using dielectrophoretic force. This will enable all-electronic detection and routing of microdroplets for programmability, compactness and ease-of-integration. Another goal of the project is to implement the sensing and routing of droplets using electrodes on printed circuit boards (PCBs) and achieve bonding of microfluidics chips on PCBs to have hybrid "electro-fluidic" chips. This will facilitate the fabrication and will allow standardization of these lab-on-a-chip devices which will widen the application range of droplet-based systems by making them available to scientists in every field. The read-out and control electronics will be placed on the same PCB and a truly sample-in result-out system will be achieved. This project will narrow the gap between the proof-of-concept microfluidic technologies and commercial devices. Combining the strength of microfluidics with the robustness of electronics, next generation lab-on-a-chip devices will be enabled to boost European competitiveness in the healthcare market.

Keywords: microfluidics,microdroplets,lab-on-a-chip,system design,microsensors,dielectrophoresis
Branding of Universities: cross-national study of competition and identity in higher education (BRANDINGUNIVERSITIES)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Israel
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG, 2012)
Start date: 2012-10-01
End date: 2016-09-30
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Universities worldwide are in the midst of a dramatic transformation of their administrative and scholarly goals. Such reforms are driven by a sense of global competition among universities (over students, faculty, funding and thus prestige) and such increased competition is now requiring universities to set strategic plans. Complementing strategies for financial solvency, global ranking, and curricula, universities also approach their identity in a strategic manner and increasingly concentrate efforts on branding. Thus, universities emulate managerial practices and borrow marketing tools from the corporate world and such emulation creates tension with the ethos of the university as a public institution. We therefore ask: How are universities creating a brand? Why are they engaging in branding? And, what are the implications of the coming of “brand society” onto campus? To consider these matters, we are compiling quantitative and qualitative data of visual material images (visual data on brands, emblems, webpages and favicons) in 14 European countries and additional 19 countries worldwide. We draw such data from university archives and publicity material, as well as from interviews with university administrators, faculty and branding consultants. We are also compiling information about the university’s structure, capacity and history, as well as about its national context, into order to analyze the causal mechanism for such worldwide branding trend. Such analyses will address both the historical changes to the university (longitudinal) and cross-national differences in university structuration (cross-sectional). Conclusions will come to wrestle with such issues as the university’s evolving mission and sense of identity, the nature of knowledge and its commercialization, and sectorial changes in the knowledge economy. For such discussions, I draw on the scholarly fields of higher education studies, organization studies, and globalization studies.

Keywords: eng university,visual identity,globalization
Cortical neuronal mechanisms of behavioural and cognitive deficits after sleep deprivation (SLEEPNEED)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: United Kingdom,United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG, 2012)
Start date: 2012-09-01
End date: 2016-08-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

A significant portion of our life is spent asleep and we still do not know why. Chronic sleep deprivation and sleep disorders are experienced by millions of people in our society, and sleep loss has profound effects on brain activity and cognitive functions. Surprisingly, we still do not know what happens in the brain after sleep deprivation that makes us feel tired and impaired even in simple tasks. The objective of this project is to provide an understanding of neuronal mechanisms underlying behavioural, sensory and cognitive changes incurred after sleep deprivation, through a suite of state-of-the-art neurophysiological techniques and methodologies. We hypothesize that prior waking experience results in specific changes in the activity of cortical neuronal networks that in turn directly results in an impaired cognition and necessitates sleep. In order to address this hypothesis we will use visual stimulation, sensory gating and ‘oddball’ paradigms, spatial navigation and reaction time tasks in rats and mice in vivo. Furthermore, we will exploit conventional and conditional knock-out mouse models to investigate global and local effects of metabotropic glutamate and GABA receptors on wake- and experience-dependent changes in cortical neuronal activity during sleep deprivation. This work will not only help to explain specific mechanisms underlying behavioural and sensory deficits after sleep deprivation, but by doing so will pave the way towards more focused innovative research relevant for public health and safety.

Keywords: l501 neuroanatomy and neurophysiology,l508 behavioral neuroscience,l507 cognition
Phenotypic heterogeneity in Bacillus subtilis biofilms (PHEHETBACBIOFILM)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Germany
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG, 2012)
Start date: 2012-10-01
End date: 2016-09-30
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Biofilms are environmentally relevant lifestyles of microorganisms. Biofilms are usually isolated from surfaces or interfaces, where cells grow together, differentiate, produce a matrix and communicate through the matrix. This matrix also protects them from environmental insults, such as antimicrobials and several other stress conditions. Biofilms possess high complexity that is changing in time and space. To achieve such a differentiation cells enter various phenotypic pathways. Several studies present example how phenotypic heterogeneity (subpopulation of cells harbouring same genotype but expressing different sets of genes therefore showing diverged phenotype) plays a role during the development of biofilms. However, most of these studies concentrate on the genes coding for enzymes involved in the production of the biofilm matrix. Therefore studies that concentrate on the genes and regulation of genes that are involved in development of biofilm structures are desired. In this proposal, I will concentrate on the interplay between different cell types present in the biofilm and the role of heterogeneity in the development of biofilm structures and maturation. This proposal aims to unravel how the structure development is modulated in B. subtilis biofilms, what is the role of the cell growth strategies, the cell-cell communication, local cell level environment and gene expression in biofilm formation. The main objectives include (1) the development of an experimental system for bacterial biofilms, where heterogeneity in metabolic status of the cells can be followed; (2) the generation of a novel theoretical model for B. subtilis biofilms; (3) the isolation of growth yield favouring phenotypes; (4) detection of heterologously expressed transcripts at the single cell level. These objectives contain state of the art molecular biology techniques (fluorescent reporters), recently developed methods(single cell transcriptome) and novel approaches.

Keywords: l607 microbiology,l809 prokaryotic biology,l609 bacteriology,biofilm,bacillus subtilis,phenotypic heterogeneity,transcriptome sequencing,gene regulation
Analysis of speciation modes in plant RNA viruses (PLANTVIRSPE)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Spain
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG, 2012)
Start date: 2012-10-01
End date: 2016-09-30
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Viruses are one of the most important groups of parasites affecting human and animal health, and crop production, and they make a large fraction of emerging diseases. A key characteristic of viruses is their high potential to generate genetic diversity. This characteristic provides viruses with a high capacity for adaptation to new environments, including new hosts. Adaptation to new host genotypes or species may lead to the appearance of new viral lineages or species: that is, to ‘speciation’ events. This process may result in the emergence of new viral diseases, and compromise existing disease control strategies. Therefore, understanding virus speciation may be of deep social and agronomical significance as it may provide the cues to predict and control viral disease epidemics. Despite the relevance of virus speciation to understand disease dynamics, little is known about how it happens and which are its driving factors, especially for plant viruses. This project will analyse the modes and ecological determinants of plant virus speciation. Specifically, my research will focus on the species of the genus Potyvirus infecting natural populations of Arabidopsis thaliana, and accompanying annual plant species. To address the objectives of this project, I will collect field data on potyviruses population genetic structure and epidemiology, as well as on host species ecological traits. I will analyse these data by combining molecular biology techniques with advanced statistic and state-of-the-art bioinformatics tools. The results of this work will be used to build a predictive model of virus emergence integrating the genetic, ecological and epidemiological data collected. The results of this research may help to understand the origin of the emergence of novel viral diseases, helping to reach the ultimate goal of developing a predictive model of viral emergence.

Keywords: l803 systems evolution - biological adaptation - phylogenetics - systematics,l802 population biology - population dynamics - population genetics,l608 virology
Environmentally Controlled Polymorphism of non-B DNA structures (ECOPOD)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Czechia
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG, 2012)
Start date: 2012-10-01
End date: 2016-09-30
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Repetitive blocks of guanine- and cytosine-rich sequences, such as those occurring in centromeric and telomeric DNA regions and promoter regions of protein coding genes, have ability to form G- and C-quadruplex structures, respectively. These non-B DNA structures are involved in more than 40 pathological human conditions including cancer. From a biophysical point of view, a common property to both G- and C-rich sequences is their inherent sensitivity to non-specific, physical-chemical environmental factors promoting their conformational polymorphism. Despite significant effort, motivated by both biological significance and biotechnological and biomedical applications of these non-B DNA motifs, the mechanistic nature of the environmentally induced effects remains poorly understood. The mechanistic insight and revealing of relationships between the DNA sequence and its folding topology in relation to its environment is essential for both rational design of novel nanomaterials and ways for their manipulations as well as for related biomedical applications. In this project, we propose systematic investigations of the influence of non-specific physical-chemical factors on structure of the DNA quadruplexes. In parallel, we propose characterization of these structures under the physiological conditions in vivo using state-of-the-art method of in-cell NMR spectroscopy. The acquired information will help to identify physiologically relevant structures of G- and C-quadruplexes.

Keywords: l106 biophysics,l107 structural biology,c113 physical chemistry of biological systems
B-cell development and gene regulation in three dimensions (GENOMIC INTERACTIONS)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Sweden
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG, 2012)
Start date: 2012-08-01
End date: 2016-07-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

A major challenge of modern cell biology is to understand how elaborate transcriptional programs drive developmental processes and maintain cellular identity. In mammals temporal and cell type specific gene regulation depend on regulatory elements in the genome. Genome-wide mapping studies have lead to the identification of myriads of regulatory elements. Strikingly these elements not only exist in abundance compared to genes in the genome, but they are also preferentially located distal to transcriptional start sites in intronic or intergenic regions. Therefore, in contrast to promoters, many regulatory elements can be separated by large genomic distances from their target genes and thus their function can not readily be predicted. A growing body of evidence suggests that regulatory elements exert their function through direct physical interactions mediated by chromatin looping. Thus, in order to accurately describe transcriptional networks and gene-regulation in the frame of B-cell development or indeed in any other cell system, these interactions need to be experimentally determined. This proposal aims to map interactions between regulatory elements on a genome-wide scale in early B-cell development. Data will be utilized to generating the first transcriptional networks based on interactions between regulatory elements. Further, transcriptional networks will be integrated with transcriptional profiles to validate accuracy of models. Taken together the proposed project should greatly increase our understanding of how transcriptional networks drive developmental progression within the frame of B-cell differentiation.

Keywords: hematopoiesis,lymphopoesis,progenitor,b-cell development,transcriptional regulation,transcriptional networks,genetic elements,enhancer,genomics,genomic organization,differentiation
Cellular and molecular mechanisms of bladder immune responses to uropathogens and therapeutics (UPECBCG)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: France
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG, 2012)
Start date: 2013-02-01
End date: 2017-01-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The bladder is a unique mucosal barrier devoid of colonizing microbiota and organized lymphoid structures. This research project will examine bladder immunobiology, specifically as it relates to urinary tract infection (UTI) and bladder cancer. Notably, UTI is second only to respiratory infection in prevalence, and bladder cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer. While commonalities between UTI and bladder cancer may not be immediately apparent, the most effective treatment for transitional cell carcinoma is intravesical instillation of BCG, or the direct introduction of bacteria into the bladder lumen. We will investigate bladder immune responses following uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) or BCG instillation, with the aim to identify how dendritic cells (DCs) and T cells behave following bacterial interactions with what is a unique mucosal surface in the body. Specifically, we will test the hypotheses that (i) bladder-resident macrophages acquire UPEC antigen in the bladder and sequester it from DCs, limiting antigen presentation, while lymph node-resident DCs capture disseminated BCG and efficiently present it; and (ii) DCs that do capture UPEC antigen lack the ability to cross-present antigen whereas BCG-antigen loaded DCs have a greater capacity to activate CD8+ T cells. These hypotheses are based on animal model and clinical observations and will help establish a scientific foundation for exploring strategies to enhance UPEC antigen-specific responses, taking lessons from BCG’s capacity to induce cross-priming. The goal of these studies is to understand the differential outcomes in adaptive immune responses to BCG or UPEC thereby defining strategies to enhance clearance of UPEC and improve the efficacy of BCG-mediated tumor immunity. My dual training as a microbiologist and immunologist will ensure that attention is given to both the bacterium and the host in defining the differential regulation governing the respective disease processes.

Keywords: lif bladder,cancer,urinary tract infection,bcg,upec
A Multi-Spectroscopic Investigation of Protein Structure in Biosilica Composites (BIOSILICA FORMATION)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Germany
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG, 2012)
Start date: 2012-09-01
End date: 2016-08-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

We propose to use sum frequency generation (SFG), near edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) and solid state NMR spectroscopy to explore the structural basis for the control exerted by basic peptides on biosilica morphology. The long-term objective of this research is to elucidate the molecular recognition mechanisms used by proteins to control biomineralization processes. The questions we ask are: What is the structural basis for protein recognition of their native mineral phases? What structural motifs do proteins use to interact with mineral phases, and what amino acid side chains orient proteins at mineral interfaces? Answers to these questions would expand not only our understanding of the role played by proteins in biomineralization, but would also provide clear structure-based principles for the design of biomaterials and biomedical devices. However, due to the difficulties in studying protein structure and function at inorganic solid surfaces, there is still remarkably little known of the molecular structure-function relationships that govern hard tissue engineering by proteins. We know far less about the structures of proteins at biomineral interfaces than we know about the structures of membrane proteins. In this proposal we focus on protein regulation of biosilica morphology. It is widely recognized that proteins regulate formation of silica- based cell walls in diatoms. We propose to use a variety of spectroscopies that we have adapted for use in studying biomaterials, to determine how proteins direct the formation of silica-based nanospheres, nanotubules and other structures.

Keywords: proteins,adsorption,surface analysis,sum frequency generation,nexafs,solid state nmr,biosilica,peptide,biomineralization,structure determination