Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Understanding the evolution of EXOplanets and towards habitable WORLDs (EXOWORLD)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Staff Exchanges
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Physics
Countries involved: Germany,Czechia,Italy,Japan,United States,Chile,Slovenia,Sweden
Call: MSCA Staff Exchanges 2021 (HORIZON-MSCA-2021-SE-01, 2021)
Start date: 2023-02-01
End date: 2027-01-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 533600.0
EU funding (EUR): 533600.0
Participants: 13
Project status: SIGNED

Exoplanets are planets that orbit stars other than our own Sun. The study of exoplanets provides insight into different stages of life cycles in planetary systems, allowing us to examine planetary physics in a global context. The objective of EXOWORLD is to develop novel detection, characterisation and statistical techniques for understanding the fundamental physics which drives the evolution of planetary systems and find out what set of conditions lead to a habitable world. With next generations of space missions and ground-based instruments on their way, there is an increasing demand for effective approaches in dealing with large exoplanet databases. Improved methods are required to extract information in photometric and spectroscopic data for small signals and push towards the discovery of smaller, lighter planets. As the number of known exoplanets grows, it is also important to analyse planet populations as an ensemble in order to connect observed planetary properties to various planet formation theories. The EXOWORLD network comprises 12 organisations from 8 countries and it will leverage interdisciplinary and international expertise to study the diversity of exoplanets. Secondments will be carried out by both Early Stage Researchers and Experienced Researchers to achieve objectives in four aspects of exoplanet research: detection, characterisation, statistics and habitability. The project will involve a series of training and networking activities aimed at knowledge transfer between participants, enhance individual skills and foster career developments. EXOWORLD will make progress in exoplanet characterisation, and results will be exploited in devising strategic observational and analytical approaches in future missions. Overall, the action will establish a sustainable, collaborative effort in exoplanet science and ultimately addresses some timeless questions “Is the Solar System unique?"

Keywords: photometry,radial velocity,exoplanet atmospheres,astrobiology,astrochemistry,machine learning,data mining
Resurrecting, re-evolving and re-inventing Rubisco: From the evolutionary past of Earth’s No. 1 CO2-fixing enzyme to its synthetic future (pro2neo-RUBISCO)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Advanced grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Panel description: Biotechnology using all organisms , biotechnology for environment  and food applications, applied plant and animal sciences , bioengineering and synthetic biology , biomass and biofuels , biohazards
Countries involved: Germany
Call: ERC ADVANCED GRANTS (ERC-2023-ADG, 2023)
Start date: 2024-10-01
End date: 2029-09-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2837483.0
EU funding (EUR): 2837483.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Can we re-construct the engine of natural CO2-fixation? Rubisco catalyzes the key reaction in photosynthesis: the capture and conversion of atmospheric CO2 into biomass. However, despite billions of years of evolution the enzyme is (still) constrained by a trade-off between CO2-fixation activity and CO2-specificity, which limits photosynthetic carbon capture, and thus directly agricultural yield. In pro2neo-RUBISCO, we will overcome this fundamental limitation of photosynthetic CO2-fixation with a completely fresh approach. We will use an evolutionary-synthetic biology strategy to study the evolutionary history of Rubisco, derive a molecular understanding for the enzyme’s mechanism, and develop highly efficient, new-to-nature solutions that we will validate in a real-world context: the living chloroplast. We will use ancestral reconstruction to replay crucial steps in the evolutionary history of the enzyme. We will resurrect the very first scaffolds that just learned to fix CO2 (“proto-Rubiscos”), and study Rubisco ancestors that started to loosely interact with an accessory small subunit. We will re-evolve these ancestral enzymes and provide them with artificial small subunits to open up new evolutionary paths leading to improved variants. These (r)evolutionary studies will be complemented by synthetic biology efforts: We will liberate Rubisco from its entropic constraints by separating the complex multi-step reaction onto different proteins that work in tandem, and go even one step further by re-inventing the enzyme’s scaffold, finding a new home for the Rubisco reaction and create a truly ”neo-Rubisco”. Compared to many efforts in the field, pro2neo-RUBISCO does not screen for existing Rubiscos with improved kinetics or improving existing Rubiscos. In pro2neo-RUBISCO, we aim at (re)exploring the history and evolutionary landscape of Rubisco, and delivering completely novel architectures for the key driver of the global carbon cycle.

Keywords: synthetic biology,co2,carboxylase,co2 fixation,metabolic engineering,rubisco
Testimony of stones: a new method in ancient traffic analysis (TAS)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Postdoctoral Fellowships
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Social Sciences and Humanities
Countries involved: Netherlands,Türkiye
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2023 (HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01, 2023)
Start date: 2025-01-01
End date: 2026-12-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 187624.32
EU funding (EUR): 187624.32
Participants: 2
Project status: SIGNED

Stone architectural elements are perhaps the most ancient witnesses of an archaeological site. Among those, threshold/paving stones are elements that take place almost at the first stage during the construction of the place. Repetitive pedestrian or vehicle movement gradually leaves a mark; this is most visible on thresholds or paving stones. The use-wear can be used to estimate which places and roads were used more; archaeologists are almost always successful in identifying spaces of movement from micro to macro scales, but only rarely can they understand the intensity (frequency) of past movement. With experimental methods in the field of rock mechanics, the abrasion caused by pedestrian traffic on rocks per unit time are calculated in a controlled setting. On the other hand, such data (unless there is a written record) are unavailable for the archaeologist, and the only evidence available is an abraded stone. The main aim of this research is to understand ancient traffic flow between spaces and to go beyond descriptive mapping-based strategies. The methodology will examine the threshold/paving stones that were already unearthed and abrasion resistance data will be determined by experimental methods (rock mechanics, experimental archaeology etc.). Following the analysis phase, the project will build an agent-based model to explore movement in and between spaces; mainly to investigate emergent characteristics of urban traffic. In this way, it can be stated that the proposal of the research is innovative in this aspect, as it will create a concrete and new line of research and interpretation of archaeological contexts and will allow the testing of existing models. Finally, an other deliverable of the project is to investigate ways of reducing physical threat to cultural heritage by means of creating a new form of emergent risk assessment.

Keywords: threshold stone,paving stone,abrasion,foot traffic,rock mechanics,agent based modelling,archaeometry,archaeology cultural heritage management
Flexible robotic solutions for the recycling of soft materials (FlexCycle)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Digital, Industry and Space
Theme: Digital
Destination: Digital & Emerging Technologies for Competitiveness and Fit for the Green Deal
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Partnership: AI-DATA-ROBOTICS (co-programmed)
Countries involved: Italy,Slovenia,Germany,Spain,Lithuania,France
Call: Novel paradigms and approaches, towards AI-powered robots– step change in functionality (AI, data and robotics partnership) (RIA) (HORIZON-CL4-2024-DIGITAL-EMERGING-01, 2024)
Start date: 2025-09-01
End date: 2029-08-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 7436428.75
EU funding (EUR): 7436428.75
Participants: 12
Project status: SIGNED

Improved circular economy relies strongly on improved methods for recycling where automation begins to be an important factor. FlexCycle addresses the domain of soft material recycling. Here automation is largely lacking, because these materials are elastic, hard to handle, and – being “trash” – are often found in unpredictable states of degradation. This makes flexible, adaptive solutions for automation an absolute necessity. This requirement is amplified by the fact that soft materials exist in many consumer products. However, specialized recycling solutions for one product group (e.g., cloth) are usually inalterable and inflexible and cannot be used elsewhere (e.g., for cables). FlexCycle addresses this difficult problem and our main contribution is to develop flexible automation methods that allow for fast and efficient transfer between different domains of soft material recycling. We address three, structurally quite different, use cases: cloth, cables and membranes from fuel cells. The novel concept of across-domain transfer of recycling methods will be achieved by adaptive components in (1) hardware and (2) software: 1) We are developing new kinds of soft, under-actuated end-effectors and other flexible robotic tools, allowing us to handle different materials with minimal hardware-reconfiguration. 2) We are developing a generalized, novel framework for modeling soft material handling by combining a substrate-overarching structural model of soft materials with advanced graph-attention neural networks to infer the desired robotic action(s). The main impact of FlexCycle is, thus, a domain independent automation approach for recycling and reuse of soft materials allowing for reduction in system setup- and programming effort based on these novel models and hardware elements. These advancements will be complemented by a study on the impact of automation in soft material recycling concerning social, economic and environmental aspects in view of the Green Deal.

Keywords: soft robotics,ai based transfer learning,robotics for sustainability,robotics for recycling
Embryonic control of trends and variation in avian colour patterns (PLUMAGE)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Advanced grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and R egeneration
Panel description: For all organisms : Structure and function of the cell, cell -cell communication, embryogenesis, tissue differentiation, organogenesis, growth, development, evolution of development, organoids, stem cells, regeneration, therapeutic approaches
Countries involved: France
Call: ERC ADVANCED GRANTS (ERC-2023-ADG, 2023)
Start date: 2025-01-01
End date: 2029-12-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2499466.0
EU funding (EUR): 2499466.0
Participants: 3
Project status: SIGNED

Most animals display striking patterns (i.e., spatial arrangement of characters in typical geometries). Natural patterns vary extensively, but also display trends within given taxa. A major biological challenge is to identify the pattern-forming events that shape this typical phenotypic landscape. Here, we propose to study the mechanisms responsible for the formation and evolution of the avian colour pattern (i.e., the spatial distribution of colour across the plumage). We test the provocative idea that despite enormous apparent diversity, variation in avian colour patterns is in fact very limited due to early developmental constraints, most variation resulting from colour choice changes in a common template. To test this hypothesis, we designed a step-wise approach organised in 4 specific research objectives: first, we will identify broadly shared and group-specific colour domains in the avian plumage by performing a quantitative survey across the entire bird phylogeny. Second, we will pinpoint the embryonic origin of these colour domains by constructing a lineage map of the developing skin. Third, we will identify positional cues controlling the establishment of embryonic blueprints of the future colour pattern by performing comparative expression analyses and functional tests in species displaying relevant pattern variation. Fourth, we will uncover changes in mechanisms through which embryonic blueprints implement the pattern in the late skin by pinpointing genetic loci co-evolving with pattern changes and testing their effect in an ex vivo system. In each objective, our methodology opportunistically uses non-model species of birds and robust functional testing performed in multiple species. Together, this proposal represents the largest comparative study of developmental processes undertaken in natural populations of birds. Results will provide a comprehensive understanding of the developmental mechanisms underlying trends and variation in natural patterns.

Keywords: colour pattern,developmental constraints,phenotypic survey,cell lineage,functional tests,bird embryos,non model species
Valorization of Marine Invasive Alien Species a Pathway Towards the Protection of European Marine Biodiversity: From Destructive Invaders to a Source of Wealth (VALIAS)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Staff Exchanges
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Environment and Geosciences
Countries involved: Greece,Cyprus,Ireland,Italy,Bulgaria,Germany,Romania,Türkiye
Call: MSCA Staff Exchanges 2022 (HORIZON-MSCA-2022-SE-01, 2022)
Start date: 2024-01-01
End date: 2027-12-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1821600.0
EU funding (EUR): 1462800.0
Participants: 11
Project status: SIGNED

VALIAS aims to match the need for managing the marine Invasive Alien Species (IAS) populations with the growing demand for marine derived-products. Under the frame of circular economy, the valorization of unexploited IAS feedstocks can represent a sustainable strategy for the realization of a circular bio-economy, with the production of stable and safe food, fish feed and cosmetic ingredients. Various compounds with high commercial value obtained from fish and other invasive aquatic species byproducts, including collagen, enzymes, bioactive peptides, minerals and functional fatty acids will be valorized in VALIAS. VALIAS proposal can turn the current problem represented by marine IAS into a "WinWin" solution both for the European fisheries and for the companies active in the sector of aquaculture, nutrition and cosmetology. Specifically, VALIAS will contribute to the limitation of IAS stocks and of their negative ecological and economic impact on marine life, fisheries, human welfare, and health in European seas. Finally, VALIAS will contribute to the enrichment of the knowledge of the biology of IAS, a key objective of European Directive 1143/2014 on the prevention and management of introduction and spread of alien species. VALIAS will bring together experts from industry and academia specialized in interdisciplinary/inter-sectorial, yet highly complementary, research areas of Marine-Maritime Research, Aquaculture, Feed-Food technology and safety and Cosmetology. As a joint research and innovation project, it will develop a strong partnership involving 8 partners from 5 EU countries (EL, CY, IT, IE and BG) and with different technical backgrounds from the academic and non-academic sectors. The execution of the project and the knowledge sharing will be based on secondments (exchanges) of research and innovation staff with an in-built return mechanism strengthening collaborative research among the different countries and sectors.

Keywords: aquafeed,cosmetics,functional foods,added value compounds,environmental sustainability
Multimaterial airframes based on 3D joints between AM metals and carbon-fiber composites (MIMOSA)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Digital, Industry and Space
Theme: Industry
Destination: Increased Autonomy in Key Strategic Value Chains for Resilient Industry
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: Italy,Austria,Slovenia,Norway,Spain
Call: Functional multi-material components and structures (RIA) (HORIZON-CL4-2022-RESILIENCE-01, 2022)
Start date: 2022-12-01
End date: 2025-11-30
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 5475469.25
EU funding (EUR): 5475469.25
Participants: 9
Project status: SIGNED

The aim of MIMOSA Project is the development of joined multi-material structures with new concepts able to exploit the digital and hybrid processes in order to achieve higher technological and economic performances with respect to current traditional joints. Furthermore, MIMOSA will lead to the application of circularity of materials and production by integrating the recycling, starting from the ideation phase of product and business. These ambitions and associated needs will be achieved with innovative technology and competitive process for multi-material joints between AlSi10Mg alloy for additive manufacturing (AM) and composites (CFRP, carbon fiber-reinforced polymers). The project proposes new joint concept design, after-service materials regeneration (50% of metals and 90% of CFRP), weight (-51%) and lead time (-65%) reduction and overall process environmental footprint reduction. A prototype of vertical stabilizer (VS) structure will be fabricated and analyzed as the business case of the Project. At the end of the Project, TRL6 is expected by starting at TRL3. Many aerostructures are composed of CFRP skin and metal parts coupled by rivets. However this kind of joint shows some drawbacks: (1) long time for assembling, (2) loss of fibers integrity due to rivet holes, (3) rivets payload, (4) joint surfaces treatment with paints needed, (5) rivets failure issues, (6) hard inspection and maintenance of rivets. MIMOSA Project will go beyond the state of the art in building aircraft structures by providing: (1) scientific research-driven integration of different design fields and fabrication processes, (2) new AM-CFRP multi-material joint concept, (3) reduced waste of materials thanks to recycling and associated economic value generation, (4) enhancement of process performances of energy consumption, lead-time and cost, (5) fabrication of a vertical stabilizer prototype (OB4) for narrow body airliners with the new AM-CFRP joint as business case.

Keywords: multi material joints integrated production additive manufacturing recycling aeronautics certification circular economy lightweight design
Bioeconomy and Circular Economy Fair Network Digitally fair and accessible network for reducing GHG activities with circular and bio-economy models (BioFairNet)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Food, Bioeconomy Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment
Theme: Bio-Environment
Destination: Other Bio-environnement destinations
Action type: Innovation actions
Countries involved: Italy,Germany,Spain,Greece,Canada,Kenya,France
Call: Demonstrating the fair and just transition from GHG-intensive economies facing challenges towards circular bioeconomy model regions (HORIZON-CL6-2024-CIRCBIO-01, 2024)
Start date: 2025-01-01
End date: 2028-12-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 4673258.75
EU funding (EUR): 4426170.8
Participants: 13
Project status: SIGNED

Bioeconomy and Circular Economy Fair Network (BioFairNet) is designed to support hotspots and specific value chains heavily reliant on greenhouse gas (GHG)-intensive industries into leaders of a sustainable bio-circular economy via a digital cooperative network. The network, understood as a digital platform and stakeholder engagement, maps, informs, transfers knowledge, and provides an exchange of communication among stakeholders to support their ecological transition. The following is achieved through instances of co-creation, testing, and validation the final product is constructed with those majorly involved aiming to close the gap on this topic between experts, public administration, businesses, and other stakeholders. The project is a deep dive into two sectors- agriculture and mining, and using a co-creation process, describes the current practice - envisions in both practical, social and economic terms what these sectors will look like post-transition and then maps a pathway to get there. The insights and tools required to support this pathway will be translated into a web-based transition tool that is both developed and implemented with end-users. In fact, the final product (network, identified as BioFairNet) that this project aims to build wants to be an item created with the stakeholders themselves.

Keywords: artificial intelligence sustainable agriculture