Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
A tangled web: Foxp2 and language related neural networks. (FOXP2 NEURAL NETWORK)

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: 2013-04-01
End date: 2017-03-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

FOXP2 was the first gene directly implicated in language development and mutations cause rare but severe forms of language disorder. FOXP2 encodes a protein that acts as a transcription factor, regulating the expression of other genes. Our previous work used FOXP2 as an entrypoint to define molecular networks associated with language, and showed that Foxp2 contributes to neurite outgrowth in the developing brain. Furthermore, mouse models suggest that Foxp2 may be acting in language related areas of the brain to affect connectivity and plasticity. Here, we aim to understand fundamental aspects of neural network formation and neuronal activity controlled by Foxp2. We will use a model system (the mouse brain) to investigate how neuronal network connectivity develops in language related brain areas. We will also manipulate levels of Foxp2 and its previously identified target genes to understand how these genes contribute to network formation. We will define the upstream regions and factors that regulate Foxp2 expression to better understand the wider molecular networks associated with language development. We predict that FOXP2 expressing neurons are related to language circuitry and thus we will use the enhancer regions that we identify to generate mouse lines that will mark out specific sub-populations of Foxp2 positive neurons in the developing brain, to shed light on the connections they form. Lastly, we will use these enhancer regions to create mouse lines that allow us to observe the activation of Foxp2 positive neurons and the role of these circuits during behavioural tasks. Taken together, this work will help us to understand the formation and activity of language related neural networks, and shed light on underlying cellular and network defects that may be associated with language disorders.

Keywords: l101 molecular biology and interactions,l208 epigenetics and gene regulation,l309 developmental genetics - embryology in animals,l511 neurological disorders
Linking tree and belowground biodiversity to forest Ecosystem function (LINKTOFUN)

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: Austria
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG, 2012)
Start date: 2013-03-01
End date: 2017-02-28
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

It has been estimated that over two thirds of terrestrial biodiversity occurs in forests emphasizing the importance of understanding the main drivers of diversity and of sustaining these ecosystems in the face of rapid climate change. One of the important ecosystem services provide by forests is carbon sequestration: soil contains twice as much C compared to the atmosphere and two-three times more than the amount stored in the vegetation biomass. There is a growing recognition that biodiversity and the underlying complexity of ecological processes in forest ecosystems are of central importance to each of the functions attributed to forests; it is also understood that forest ecosystem resilience and adaptive capacity in the face of climate change is strongly linked to biodiversity. The LINKTOFUN project will focus on comparisons between natural forest ecosystems, nearby managed forests, and a plantation mixture, and will link forest biodiversity to ecosystem function in a number of forest types in Austria. The work will focus on several natural wilderness sites, a highly instumented semi natural site , an instrumented site in a managed forest , and a newly established tree biodiversity manipulation site . The major objectives of LINKTOFUN are to obtain: 1. An understanding of tree-biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships based on state-of-the-art molecular and biogeochemical data from mature stands with naturally high biodiversity, compared with managed stands with (assumed) low biodiversity. 2. An understanding of the role of biodiversity in regulating and maintaining forest ecosystem function. 3. Detailed data on relationships between forest biodiversity and carbon dynamics. To estimate biodiversity and the functional group diversity in soil we will use morphotyping and molecular approaches, and intergrate high throught-put systems.

Keywords: biodiversity,forest ecosystems,mycorrhizas,trees,carbon dynmics,soil carbon
THE ROLE OF EPIGENETICS IN THE REGULATION OF CELL-SPECIFIC ALTERNATIVE SPLICING PROGRAMS (CHROMATIN & SPLICING)

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: 2014-01-01
End date: 2017-12-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Re-differentiation of carcinogenic epithelial cells to mesenchymal by epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) confers properties to tumour cells, which turn them highly metastatic and resistant to chemotherapy. Traditionally, it was thought that expression of key genes was enough to induce EMT. However, very recently, alternative processing of transcribed genes into different matured mRNAs, and therefore proteins, by alternative splicing has also been implicated in EMT progression. Even more, switches in cancer-specific splicing isoforms to normal variants have been shown to reduce tumorigenicity and revert EMT. In parallel, recent observations point to an important regulatory role of chromatin structure and ncRNAs in modulating alternative splicing. This project aims to combine these new concepts to uncover, for the first time, the role of epigenetics in the regulation of cell-specific splicing programs in an inducible, physiologically relevant EMT cell reprogramming system. I will, first, probe at a gene-specific and genome-wide level the role of DNA and histone modifications in the establishment and maintenance of a new EMT-induced splicing program. Then, using a high-throughput screening approach, I will identify and characterize novel miRNAs and chromatin-based regulators of EMT-mediated alternative splicing that will be functionally tested for their capacity to impair EMT. This multidisciplinary project integrates novel concepts and challenging approaches in the field of epigenetics, ncRNA, splicing and cancer biology that will bring, conceptually and mechanistically, new insights into alternative splicing regulation and how cancer-specific splicing programs are established and maintained. In the long-term, this study has the potential to discover unexpected and innovative new molecular mechanisms of splicing regulation that can be applied for predicting and restoring cell-specific splicing patterns by mapping and modulating epigenetic modifications.

Keywords: epigenetics,chromatin,alternative splicing,non-coding rna,emt,genomics (rna-seq and chip-seq)
Global Americanisation of Rulemaking? (GLAMRULE)

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
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG, 2012)
Start date: 2013-04-01
End date: 2016-03-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 75000.0
EU funding (EUR): 75000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Emerging but extensive literature remarks the interdependence of governments also in administrative law. Transparency, openness, accountability, and the use of scientific evidence are values now common in rulemaking of many countries. Although theoretical and empirical efforts to frame and evidence the Americanisation of administrative law and regulatory governance, a metrical measure for assessing the extent of convergence is still lacking. This research project fills this gap, by assessing the extent of converge among OECD and EU member states. An index of similarity over four decades is derived from an original data set on administrative requirements. This index allows to measure the extent of similarity across four decades and test alternative convergence explanations, by relying on different methods. This research aims to assess the explanatory power of the underlying causes of Americanisation against the emergence of a European Administrative space via harmonisation, the transnational communication facilitated by the OECD, as well as globalising economic and political structures. The proposed research attempts to make the following three contributions to the literature of political science and comparative administrative law. The first contribution concerns the concept formation of administrative rulemaking. The emergence and the evolution of regulatory governance is taken into account, in order to trace the sequence and the cross-national pattern of regulatory oversight adoption. The second contribution refers to the literature of ‘global administrative law’, by assessing and estimating the extent of rulemaking process convergence. The final contribution is to the methodological literature on policy convergence.

Keywords: s112 global and transnational governance - international law - human rights - policy convergence - regulation - administrative rulemaking
Dynamics of transporters dependent on ubiquitin in plants : mechanisms, roles in plant nutrition and beyond (DYNAMIT)

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: 2013-07-01
End date: 2017-06-30
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Cells use a battery of cell-surface proteins to monitor their environment, communicate and take up nutrients. The mechanisms driving the temporal and spatial distribution of plasma membrane are therefore of critical importance for growth and development. Endocytosis dependent on ubiquitin (Ub) has been mostly involved in the retrieval of cell-surface proteins and their targeting to the lysosome/vacuole for degradation in mammals and yeast. Higher plants evolved from an ancient branch of the eukaryotic tree and are more distant from animals and yeast than the latter two are from each other. In parallel, a huge number of gene families in plants have undergone independent expansion and a significant percentage of plant genes have no orthologs in yeast and animals. As such, a great number of endocytic processes in plants are mediated by factors known in animals but used i) in different ways, ii) mediated by plant-specific factors, or iii) using factors belonging to dramatically expanded families for which no functional information is available. My work recently demonstrated the existence of Ub-mediated endocytosis in plants, using the root iron transporter IRT1 as a model. IRT1 represents a unique opportunity to address ubiquitin-dependent trafficking and to study the functional link between a fundamental cellular process and its nutritional outcome at the level of the multicellular plant organism. In this proposal, I aim to identify the precise roles of ubiquitination in the dynamics of plant cell-surface proteins and shed light on the machinery driving Ub-dependent internalization and sorting in plants. This proposal is based on novel and large scale biochemical and genetic approaches in synergy with systematic use of cell biology and phenotypic analyis. This work is expected to lead to the identification and characterization of a large number of new key factors in the plant endocytic pathway and shed light on the evolution of eukaryotic membrane systems.

Keywords: l302 cell biology and molecular transport mechanisms,l308 signal transduction,endocytosis,ubiquitin,plant nutrition
How do words inform? Explaining the role of information theory in language comprehension (WORDINFO)

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: Netherlands
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG, 2012)
Start date: 2013-03-01
End date: 2016-02-29
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 75000.0
EU funding (EUR): 75000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Cognition is often said to arise from information processing. Indeed, information theory has been applied to explain aspects of human cognition, such as fluctuations in cognitive load during reading: By computing how much information each word conveys, it can be shown that reading more informative words takes longer, and leads to dilation of the reader’s pupils. However, it is as yet unclear how these observed effects of word information come about: What are the underlying mechanisms from which they emerge? The proposed project aims to fill this gap in our understanding of human language, by combing computational modelling and human experimental research. First, an original model is developed, based on the Deep Belief Network (DBN) architecture, that extracts language statistics from a large text corpus. As a well-defined probability model, the DBN can compute word-information values over a set of test sentences. These values, which depend only on the acquired language statistics, form _predictions_ of word-reading times and pupil size. In addition, DBNs are neurally inspired and can be made to process input dynamically, mimicking cognitive processing over continuous time. This yields _simulated_ reading times, which depend on the model’s processing assumptions. Likewise, model-internal dynamics will be taken to simulate cognitive load that correlates with pupil size. Next, in eye-tracking and pupillometry studies, _actual_ reading-time and pupil-size data are collected over the same test sentences as processed by the model. Statistical analyses of the relations between predicted, simulated, and actual data will reveal how, exactly, the effects of word information arise. This greatly increases our understanding of the structures and mechanisms involved in language comprehension. Moreover, the project will yield a more accurate cognitive interpretation of pupil dilation and can elucidate the relation between information-theoretical and psychological constructs.

Keywords: s205 formal - cognitive - functional and computational linguistics,sentence comprehension,reading,eye-tracking,pupillometry,information theory,cognitive modelling,psycholinguistics
Large scale elucidation of the biological functions of the Staphylococcal RNome in genetic hybrid systems (SARHYB)

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: France
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IIF, 2013)
Start date: 2014-09-01
End date: 2016-08-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 269743.8
EU funding (EUR): 269743.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Every year in the European Union, an estimated 25000 patients die because of a serious resistant bacterial infection acquired in hospital. The bacterium Staphylococcus aureus is a main opportunistic pathogen responsible for food poisoning, skin infections and nosocomial infections. In the recent years, small ribonucleic acids (sRNAs) have attracted great interests as ubiquitous regulators. Some of them have been directly related to commitment of virulence of this species. However, a serious bottleneck in unraveling their biological roles is due to the difficulty in identifying targets of the RNome (any non-conventional RNA with regulatory functions). There is a strong and urgent need to propose and use novel technologies for target detections of the bacterial RNomes. SarHyb intends to identify the primary molecular targets of staphylococcal RNome with a multidisciplinary approach. Therefore, t will combine the use of novel bacterial genetic hybrid systems, molecular biology and biochemistry. The researcher has an in depth expertise in the use or large-scale studies and yeast as a surrogate system which he used during his postdoctoral training at Yale University (USA). The main objective of SarHyb is to provide a list of prioritized sRNA candidates to target for the development of novel drug therapy directed against this pathogen. The transfer of knowledge from the researcher will consolidate the position of the host institution as a leader in Europe and worldwide in the use of hybrid-systems. Major Scientific findings expected during the course of the project include the development of the first bacterial hybrid systems devoted to RNA-target identification, an exhaustive list of mRNA and proteins directly regulated by sRNAs, and an in-depth understanding of the molecular signals allowing S. aureus to adapt to its environment. If successful, this ambitious research project will impact both basic and translational research at the European Union level.

Keywords: small rna,rnome,regulatory rna,srna,molecular targets,staphylococcus aureus,pathogens,yeast,three-hybrid system,rna-hybrid system,regulation.
Imperial Ambassadresses between the Courts of Madrid and Vienna (1650-1700): Diplomacy, Sociability and Culture. (AMBASSADRESSES)

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: Austria
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF, 2013)
Start date: 2014-04-01
End date: 2016-03-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 248379.6
EU funding (EUR): 248379.6
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The aim of my project is to analyse the diplomatic and cultural role of the Imperial ambassadresses in the court of Madrid, along with the impact of their posts upon their subsequent lives in the court of Vienna. The chosen time frame is the second half of the 17th century, a period in which the foreign relations between the Spanish Monarchy and the Empire were marked by the so-called "question of succession". The new diplomatic history dedicated to the early modern period has paid little attention to the wives of the ambassadors, despite the fact that in the 17th century these women received the meaningful title of "ambassadresses", which denotes respect on the part of the courts where their husbands carried out their embassies. The ambassadresses supported their husbands' networks and initiated diplomatic strategies such as patronage or mediation; furthermore, they acted as cultural agents, exporting works of art and books but also lifestyles, body cultures and sociabilities. Nevertheless, historiography continues to view the diplomatic activities of these women as the exception and not the rule. With this project I hope to demonstrate the opposite: the ambassadresses, although without holding the official post of ambassador, carried out diplomatic activities similar to those of their husbands. To illustrate the importance of the ambassadresses, I will analyse the social, political and cultural profiles of the wives of the Empire's ambassadors in the court of Madrid (1650-1700), paying particular attention to the category of gender. As a starting point, I will use a broad concept of diplomacy, analysing its least-known informal elements. To this end, I will take special note of the material turn, exploring bodies and spaces and interpreting gestures and artefacts. My research will create narratives of continuity and discontinuity in the new diplomatic history and will serve as a launch pad for future gender studies in the field of foreign relations.

Keywords: early modern europe,new diplomatic history,gender,material culture,court,sociability,everyday life,women,power,body culture,spanish monarchy,empire,queens,ambassadresses,17th century.
Electronic Structures Sono-Engineering of Semiconductor Nanoparticles for Efficient Solar Energy Exploitation (SONO ENGINEERING)

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-2013-IEF, 2013)
Start date: 2014-10-01
End date: 2016-09-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 231283.2
EU funding (EUR): 231283.2
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

This research aims to harness ultrasonication as innovative thermal treatment tool to effectively engineer the electronic structures of colloidal particles. The main objectives of this project are: 1) to develop various interfacial strategies to establish a general and innovative low cost ultrasonication based thermal treatment protocol; 2) to gain novel and effective sono-engineering methodologies for introducing intrinsic/extrinsic defects in seminconductor nanoparticles; and 3) to acquire innovatively enhanced photovoltaic behaviors of from the sono-engineered semiconductor nanostructures. The anticipated thermal treatment will be easy, cheap, easily accessible, and feasible for massive production in comparison with conventional black-body-radiation-based thermal treatment. This will enable one to gain in-depth insight to the physics of acoustic bubbles and especially the energy release during bubble collapse and to effectively transform existing semiconductor particles to be photovoltaic and photoelectrochemical more active for efficient storage and conversion of solar energy and exploitation, thus making a significant step forwards in solar energy exploitation. The proposed project is a multidisciplinary one, and the results of the project can be of great interest for scientists and engineers from diverse areas including colloids and interface science, material science, nanotechnology, condensed matter physics, sonochemistry, electrochemisty and photovoltaics. According to the project objectives, the proposed project contributes to the “Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies, Materials and new Production Technologies (NMP)”, one of the themes of the 7th European Framework Cooperation Programme. Successfully carrying out of this project will result in significant economic, environmental and strategic impact to energy industry and our sustainable society.

Keywords: engineering,ultrasonication,semiconductor nanoparticles,electronic structure,surface chemistry,interfacial sonochemistry,photovoltaics,solar energy harvesting,solar energy conversion