Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Linking aggregation of alpha-synuclein to proteasomal dysfunction; an investigation of the causes leading to Parkinson's disease (PROTEASOME-AMYLOID)

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-2009-IEF, 2009)
Start date: 2010-10-01
End date: 2012-09-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 172740.8
EU funding (EUR): 172740.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a severe neurodegenerative disease affecting more than 800000 people in Europe. Aggregation of the brain protein alpha-synuclein (aS) and its deposition into intracellular inclusions is a crucial event in the pathway leading to the onset of this tremendous disease. This process is triggered by alterations of the delicate homeostasis between production, aggregation and degradation of aS. aS aggregates are toxic to neurons and have been shown to impair proteasome, the cellular machinery which degrades misfolded/deleterious proteins. Little is known about the interplay between aS and proteasome. This lack of information currently represents one of the major limits to the development of new therapies for treatment of PD. The aim of this project is to carry out an unprecedented characterization of the interaction between aS and human proteasome and to investigate the effect that proteasome has on aS aggregation. By coupling computer predictions with cutting edge experimental methodologies such as NMR and single molecule measurements, we will characterize the regions of aS responsible for interacting with proteasome and the aggregated species responsible for impairment of proteasomal activity. Furthermore, the ability of proteasome to revert/inhibit aggregation of aS will be assessed studying aS aggregation in the presence of proteasome. The outcome of this research will provide missing building blocks to reach a complete knowledge of PD causes and will lead to the identification of new targets for molecular pharmacology, contributing to the development of new therapies for PD. The work will be undertaken in Prof. Dobson’s group, at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Cambridge (UK), one of the top research Institutes in Europe. The possibility to join this group and to master innovative techniques complementary to his background will allow the researcher to grow as a mature scientist able to perform multidisciplinary research.

Keywords: health sciences,amyloid,proteasome,aggregation,alpha-synuclein,fibrils,oligomers
Advanced Methodologies for the Determination of the Lability of Trace Metals and Their Application to Contaminated Soils (MEDEA)

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-2009-IEF, 2009)
Start date: 2010-09-01
End date: 2012-08-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 172740.8
EU funding (EUR): 172740.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Much of Western Europe has inherited soil contaminated with heavy metals from past mining, mineral processing and industrial activities. When performing risk assessment for eco-toxicological, human health or ground water vulnerability studies the major issue is not the total concentration of the heavy metal but its labile fraction i.e. the proportion of the metal transferable to an aqueous phase in ionic form. This may vary widely as a function of the solid forms in which the metal is hosted, the pH and redox conditions in pore waters that control the lability, or the occurrence of other species within the aqueous phase which may provide competitive sorption or preferential transport modes. Given the toxicity of a number of heavy metals even at low contents, accurate methods are required to properly monitor them in the environment and gain further insight in their behaviour. Simple extraction schemes are the most common procedure to assess natural availability of heavy metals in different scenarios. However, it has been demonstrated that these are unable to measure the true proportion of metal that may be exchangeable and contribute to lability, which may lead to unreliable risk assessments. This proposal seeks to accurately study the lability of heavy metals in several polluted scenarios by applying one of the most advanced methodologies for this purpose, namely ‘isotope dilution’ (ID). This technique reflects the pool of reactive metal in the soil and can be used to model solid-solution equilibria and the fixation of metal ions into less available forms. ID method has been successfully implemented for Cd, Zn and As, while a method for environmentally significant elements such as Fe, Sb and Se -particularly susceptible to redox conditions- remains to be developed. Data will be combined with soil pore water analyses to geochemically model scenarios and determine the role of changing redox conditions in the releases of heavy metals to the environment.

Keywords: environmental geology,geochemistry,environmental risks
Molecular mechanisms of pediatric immunodeficiency syndromes affecting natural killer cell cytotoxicity (NK IN HLH)

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: Sweden
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IIF, 2009)
Start date: 2010-11-01
End date: 2012-10-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 181669.4
EU funding (EUR): 181669.4
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The pediatric immunodeficiency syndromes familial haemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis types 3 (FHL3) and 4 (FHL4), and Griscelli syndrome type 2 (GS2) are associated with loss-of-function of Munc13-4, syntaxin 11 (Stx11) and Rab27a, respectively. These proteins are members of families of membrane fusion-regulating proteins, but the precise molecular role of these proteins in granule release is incompletely understood. All of these mutations result in a loss of cytotoxic function by NK cells and cytotoxic CD8+ T lymphocytes, resulting in a life-threatening sepsis-like condition. This project proposes to define the precise molecular role of these known regulators of NK cell granule exocytosis. In addition, other proteins will be screened for a role in granule release. These additional regulators may have mutations in the many patients with immunodeficiencies of no known genetic basis. In order to define the role of individual proteins in the granule release process, a detailed map of the sub-cellular events leading to granule exocytosis will be defined. The movement of proteins and organelles prior to fusion of granules with the cell surface is more complex than previously thought, and remains controversial. Thus, this project aims to increase understanding of the molecular mechanisms of lymphocyte cytotoxicity, in addition to broadening the spectrum of immunodeficiency syndromes and improving the clinical diagnosis and treatment of immunodeficiencies.

Keywords: health sciences,immunology,nk cells,pediatrics,immunodeficiency
Random Dynamical Systems (RDS-JALC)

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-2009-IEF, 2009)
Start date: 2011-10-01
End date: 2013-09-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 165540.8
EU funding (EUR): 165540.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The proposed research and training project aims at giving a major progress in the development of the interaction between classical and random dynamical systems, a key subject for the European Research Area with many applications. In particular, we want to deepen understanding of the following topics: (i) Ergodic properties of random billiards. We will analyse a broad class of billiard geometries, study skew-product representations for the billiard flow, and investigate central limit theorems. (ii) Absolute continuity of laws of transformed Brownian motions. We would like to give necessary and sufficient conditions to guarantee that, when transformed according to a family of diffeomorphisms, the laws of a Brownian motion on the path space are absolutely continuous with respect to the original laws. Reduction techniques and Lie-group theoretical arguments are expected to be used in this research. (iii) Bifurcation of random dynamical systems. Several notions of bifurcation available for random systems will be compared. Random dynamical systems with bounded noise will receive special attention and will be studied with control theory techniques. Under bounded noise perturbations, we want to characterise invariant measures and their support as well as domains of attraction. In order to achieve these research objectives, the researcher will be specifically trained by the dynamical systems group (DynamIC) of Imperial College London in ergodic theory, bifurcation theory for autonomous and non-autonomous dynamical systems, and analysis on infinite dimensional spaces.

Keywords: physical sciences,technological sciences,random dynamical systems.
Intelligent Support for Authoring Semantic Learning Content (ISASLC)

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: Germany
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IIF, 2009)
Start date: 2010-07-01
End date: 2012-12-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 217782.0
EU funding (EUR): 217782.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Content authoring for adaptive educational systems is a tedious and expensive procedure. It requires from the author to have a high level of expertise in the subject domain, knowledge engineering and metadata standards. Over the last decade considerable efforts have been put into improving authoring practices through the development of authoring tools and proposal of metadata standards. Yet, to a large degree, the existing collections of learning objects suffer from a number of problems. Lack of metadata limits the use of learning content in adaptive systems and impedes its discovery, sharing and reuse. Another set of problems results from the design of existing authoring tools. While providing sophisticated functionality they have limited support of the author herself. Intelligent authoring support will allow a wider population of authors to participate in semantic learning content creation. Most of the existing authoring tool are developed to be used by a single author. This paradigm disregards the success of collaborative authoring patterns introduced by Social Web applications. This project will address the problem of semantic learning content authoring from several perspectives and will employ a set of technologies to provide comprehensive and intelligent support of the authoring process. Implementation of each technology will be performed as a separate work package: * collaborative authoring support; * intelligent support of metadata creation; * open-corpus content discovery. The target domain of the project will be the domain of mathematics, which is a core subject in every EU country’s education program. However, both the set of problems and the proposed solutions are domain-independent. The obtained results are expected to be transferable to other domains. The evaluation of the developed technologies will be performed with the partners of ActiveMath group and will be based on the analysis of social feedback and a set of experiments.

Keywords: computer-assisted education,information technology,mathematics
Shakespeare and the 1590s Style (EARLY SHAKESPEARE)

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: Ireland
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IIF, 2009)
Start date: 2011-01-01
End date: 2012-12-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 232082.8
EU funding (EUR): 232082.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The project explores how the early style of Shakespeare&apos;s dramatic and non-dramatic works written before 1595, which remains one of the least explored areas in Shakespeare studies, was shaped through a range of influences that came from withing England, European tradition of rhetoric, and classical sources. Critics have often thought of that style in terms of form (language) only, not as a product of a complex interplay of historical, political, ideological, and artistic influences brining &apos;modernity&apos; England. However, a comparative analysis of the style of Shakespeare&apos;s early works within the historical context, modern literary and critical theories, especially an interdisciplinary research involving rhetoric (language and style), history, religion, and visual arts (sculptures and paintings), and the contemporary theories of identity, performance, and nation formation will show that Shakespeare&apos;s early style was far more &apos;European&apos; and &apos;humanist&apos; in origin than it has been hitherto assumed because he relied heavily on two traditions available to him: one was the persistent influence of the classical and European humanist literature on the English tradition in the 1590s (the most important decade in the emergence in the formation of English literature) and the growing import of European style in the visual arts and architecture in England, which became apparent in London, when Shakespeare arrived there. I propose to write a monograph on this topic, and a major academic publisher in the UK has already expressed an interest in it, and I plan to organize an international conference at UC Cork and publish a volume of essays based on that conference. The study aims to develop a comparative and European approach to interpreting Shakespeare&apos;s early style as well as the idea of &apos;early&apos; style in the aesthetics of the 1590s. One key aspect will be to use interdisciplinary and comparative approach to explore the differing European appraoches to stylistic formation.

Keywords: humanities,shakespeare,1590,style,history,identity,classical influences,literary sources,culture and identity
Symbolic and non-symbolic number processing, a developmental perspective (QUANTITY IN NUMBER)

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: Belgium
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IEF, 2009)
Start date: 2011-04-01
End date: 2013-03-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 159100.0
EU funding (EUR): 159100.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The symbolic number system that has evolved in humans enables more complex and accurate calculations than a non-symbolic system. The application of this symbolic system has turned out to be so useful that we have a hard time imagining the world without it. This patent importance makes the study of questions about the acquisition and implementation of these processes in the human brain very relevant. In the current study, three important and related topics in numerical cognition will be addressed: (1) the neural mechanisms underlying the acquisition of symbolic and non-symbolic mathematical abilities in young children, (2) the possible predictive value of numerical abilities or their neural correlates in the acquisition of proficient symbolic mathematical abilities and (3) the neural mechanisms underlying typical and atypical mathematics development. To address these issues we will use both behavioral as well as imaging techniques: electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). These neuroimaging methods are complementary as they provide information about the timing of processes and the neural substrates subserving these processes, respectively. Moreover, besides the timing of processes, EEG can also be used to study neuronal coherence. For instance, frequency band analysis of EEG data has been proven to be of great value in studying cognitive maturation. This method, which has not been implemented in the field of numerical cognition yet, has great potential to advance this field of research. In conclusion, we will address questions question about the neural mechanisms involved in the development of numerical abilities using neuroimaging techniques. The outcomes can have major impact on the implementation of mathematics education and the early identification of children at risk for mathematical difficulties (also referred to as dyscalculia).

Keywords: social sciences,neurosciences,neuropsychology,numerical cognition,eeg,development
Function and regulation of CRL4s-based ubiquitin-dependent processes for mitotic progression. (JM_ETHZ_IEF_2009)

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: Switzerland
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IEF, 2009)
Start date: 2011-06-01
End date: 2013-05-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 172565.2
EU funding (EUR): 172565.2
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Mitosis relies heavily on ubiquitin-dependent degradation of specific protein substrates, mainly by the APC/C and CUL3-RING E3 ligases (CRL3s). In contrast, CUL4-RING E3 ligases (CRL4s) have previously been associated with silencing of gene expression, DNA replication and repair. However, unpublished data from the Peter laboratory suggest that CRL4s may also be important for progression through mitosis. In this grant proposal, I thus present two complementary approaches to investigate the role of CRL4s for progression through mitosis in human cells. First, I will complete an RNAi screen to identify specific CRL4 substrate adaptors and regulators important for correct mitotic progression. Second, I will functionally and biochemically characterize the most promising candidates, which may regulate kinetochore function and faithful chromosome alignment. Preliminary results from a pilot screen performed in our lab, as well as the on-going screen, already indicate several promising candidates required for faithful progression through mitosis. By combining an unbiased large-scale with a candidate approach, I expect to unravel novel functions of CRL4s in mitosis, and identify specific roles for CRL4 substrate adaptors in spindle/microtubules dynamics, kinetochore function, and chromosome attachment. I believe that the proposed experiments cover an important area of fundamental biochemistry and cell biology and will provide important new insights into our understanding of mitosis.

Keywords: cell biology,human biology
MIMYCS, A framework for simulating maize kernels mycotoxin contamination in Europe (MIMYCS)

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: European organisations area
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IEF, 2009)
Start date: 2010-07-16
End date: 2012-07-15
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 144290.6
EU funding (EUR): 144290.6
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Maize is one of the main crops grown for human food and livestock feed, using more than 8.5 million ha of cropland annually in Europe. The crop is heavily affected by mycotoxin problems throughout the world. Mycotoxins are toxic compounds recognised as the principal cause of human and animal chronic intoxications. In addiction to health risk, regulations of the European Union and other countries of the world on the maximum levels of mycotoxins in cereals have had an important socio-economic impact on the global cereal market. Mycotoxin contamination is the result of a complex pathosystem formed by maize, insect borers and toxigenic fungi, influenced by environmental and climate conditions and by agro-management. The objective of the project MIMYCS (Maize Infection and MYcotoxin Contamination Simulator) is the development of a simulation model system linking existing models and developing original approaches for estimating the behaviour of the pathosystem in response to weather conditions and agro-management in Europe. The pathosystem will be simulated using deterministic approaches, and process-based. The model will be implemented as a software component to be first used in the crop growth and monitoring system of the Joint Research Centre – AGRI4CAST of the European Commission. The implementation will follow the software architecture for reusable components in use at JRC. The development of MIMYCS via the component based methodology will allow an easy re-use of it for (i) performing simulations to inform European policy makers involved in food and feed safety of the effects of European mycotoxin policies and help them to fix safe and, at the same time, feasible contamination limits, (ii) performing simulation about climate change scenario effects on the pathosystem and on future maize grain safety, (iii) assisting maize producers in controlling mycotoxin contamination through agro-management and improving maize grain safety.

Keywords: modelling of integrated systems,mycotoxins,toxigenic fungi,insect borers,maize,food and feed safety,modelling frameworks,component-oriented programming,climate change