Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
In planta jet injection: Efficient genetic engineering of resilient crops (Plant-a-Jet)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Proof of concept grants
Action type: ERC actions
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: ERC PROOF OF CONCEPT GRANTS2 (ERC-2022-POC2, 2022)
Start date: 2023-09-01
End date: 2025-08-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 150000.0
EU funding (EUR): 150000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Feeding 11 billion people by 2100 in a changing climate is a global challenge. Without further innovation, predicted crop yield will decrease due to climate change effects. Moreover, the number of biotic threats is increasing with pathogen pressure and infection risk showing temperature-dependency as well. Thus, crop breeding must be invigorated to generate plants with higher yield, and climate change resilience needs to be urgently met. Genome editing has the potential to assist classical breeding. Breeding based on gene editing enables faster production of crops with improved traits such as drought tolerance, disease resistance, and increased yield. Established delivery methods for in planta crop transformation are labor-intensive, cannot be applied to any crop species and have low transformation efficiencies, often below 1%. Delivering genome-editing cargo efficiently and cost-competitive in vivo, through the hard plant cell wall, is an unmet challenge. With our approach we aim to generate affordable, high-throughput devices that enable fast and efficient transformation of crops. Thus, our scalable approach is compatible with mass production. This, in turn, will open the market for transgenic plants for newcomers leading to more innovation and competition that will drive food costs for the consumers and varied products.
ACCELERATION OF PHOTOCATALYTIC GREEN HYDROGEN PRODUCTION TO MARKET READINESS THROUGH VALUE-ADDED OXIDATION PRODUCTS (PH2OTOGEN)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Climate, Energy and Mobility
Theme: Public-private partnerships
Destination: Clean Hydrogen
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Partnership: CLEANH2 (JU-JTI)
Countries involved: Belgium,Netherlands,France,Germany,Switzerland
Call: Photoelectrochemical (PEC) and/or Photocatalytic (PC) production of hydrogen (HORIZON-JTI-CLEANH2-2023-1, 2023)
Start date: 2024-01-01
End date: 2027-06-30
Duration (months): 42.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2498813.75
EU funding (EUR): 2498813.25
Participants: 8
Project status: SIGNED

With rising anthropogenic CO2 emissions resulting in climate change, solutions to rapidly bring green hydrogen to market are required. PH2OTOGEN aims to build a scalable photocatalytic flow reactor for green hydrogen production with parallel production of value-added oxidation products, which will contribute to the revenues of the overall system. The PH2OTOGEN consortium will use advanced characterisation techniques to determine promising and novel combinations of semiconducting materials to achieving an average solar-to-hydrogen efficiency of > 5% over 500 hours in a 500 cm2 demonstrator.

Keywords: solar,photocatalytic,green hydrogen,value added oxidation products
Wireless Networks within Next-Generation Computing Systems (WINC)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Systems and Communication Engineering
Panel description: Electrical, electronic, communication, optical and systems engineering
Countries involved: Spain
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2021-STG, 2021)
Start date: 2022-10-01
End date: 2027-09-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1494889.0
EU funding (EUR): 1494889.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Computing systems are ubiquitous in our daily life and have transformed the way we learn, work, or communicate with each other, to the point that progress is intimately tied to the improvements brought by new generations of the processors that lie at the heart of these systems. A common trait of current computing systems is that their internal data communication has become a fundamental bottleneck. The anticipated death of Moore’s Law has forced computer scientists and architects to find new ways to build faster processors, which include massive parallelization, specialized accelerator design, and disruptive technologies such as quantum computing. These trends cause an exponential increase in the volume and variability of data transfers within computing systems, rendering traditional interconnects insufficient and threatening to halt progress unless fast and versatile communication alternatives are developed. In this context, the WINC project envisions a revolution in computer architecture enabled by the integration of wireless networks within computing systems. The main hypothesis is that wireless terahertz technology will lead to at least a tenfold improvement in the speed, efficiency, and scalability of both non-quantum and quantum systems. With a cross-cutting approach, WINC aims to validate the hypothesis by (i) revealing the fundamental limits of wireless communications within computing packages, (ii) developing antennas and protocols that operate close to those limits while complying with the stringent constraints of the scenario, and (iii) developing radically novel architectures that translate the unique benefits of the wireless vision into order-of-magnitude improvements at the system level. If successful, WINC will be the seed of a new generation of non-quantum and quantum systems and foster progress in the computing field for the decades to come.

Keywords: wireless chip scale communications network on chip network in package
The Plant Water Pump (ThePlantWaterPump)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Earth System Science
Panel description: Physical geography, geo logy, geophysics, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, climatology, cryology, ecology, global environmental change, biogeochemical cycles, natural resources management
Countries involved: Belgium,Denmark
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2021-STG, 2021)
Start date: 2022-10-01
End date: 2027-09-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1740798.75
EU funding (EUR): 1740798.75
Participants: 2
Project status: SIGNED

With global warming, climate zones are projected to shift poleward, and the frequency and intensity of droughts to increase, driving threats to crop production and ecosystems. Plant hydraulic traits play major roles in coping with such droughts, and process-based plant hydraulics (water flowing along decreasing pressure or total water potential gradients) has newly been implemented in land surface models. An enigma reported for the past 35 years is the observation of water flowing along increasing water potential gradients across roots. By combining the most advanced modelling tool from the emerging field of plant micro-hydrology with pioneering cell solute mapping data, I found that the current paradigm of water flow across roots of all vascular plants is incomplete: it lacks the impact of solute concentration (and thus negative osmotic potential) gradients across living cells. This gradient acts as a water pump as it reduces water tension without loading solutes in plant vasculature (xylem). Importantly, water tension adjustments in roots may have large impacts in leaves due to the tension-cavitation feedback along stems. With The Plant Water Pump I will combine for the first time cutting-edge osmotic mapping and micro-hydrological modelling approaches to (1) characterize water status and osmotic responses to water deficit in diverse crop and tree species, (2) revolutionize the current paradigm of plant water uptake, and (3) increase the accuracy of plant water status functions for land surface models. By creating a continuum between key cell-scale variables and plant-scale water fluxes, this project lays the foundations for future multidisciplinary research encompassing plant physiology and ecohydrology. Besides its groundbreaking contribution to the fundamental understanding of plant water relations, this effort embodies a much-needed step toward the accurate forecasting of land water fluxes and decision support under future climates.

Keywords: ecohydrology,plant hydrodynamics,multiscale modelling,land surface models,root water uptake,soil hydraulics,cavitation,xylem,water deficit
THRUST - SUBSTITUTING HELICOPTERS WITH CLIMATE-FRIENDLY FIXED-WING DRONES FOR INFRASTRUCTURE INSPECTION (THRUST)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Innovative Europe
Programme: European innovation ecosystems
Theme: Elevating the scalability potential of European business
Destination: Elevating the scalability potential of European business
Action type: Coordination and support actions
Countries involved: Lithuania
Call: Women TechEU (HORIZON-EIE-2021-SCALEUP-01, 2021)
Start date: 2022-06-01
End date: 2023-02-28
Duration (months): 9.0
Total project cost (EUR): 107142.86
EU funding (EUR): 75000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

In EU alone total length of overhead electricity lines reaches staggering 5.3 million km. That is more than 5 million km of potential fail points, that need to be inspected and maintained in order to ensure the reliability of electricity supply. Currently, these inspections are carried out by helicopters or walking inspection crews. However, the walking crews are slow and inefficient, while helicopters are expensive and damaging our climate (helicopters consume 60 liters of fuel per hour). Our solution – substituting helicopters and walking crews with our new generation unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with LiDAR , RGB and thermal cameras, combined with machine learning (ML) powered analytics, that can quickly and accurately identify defects and faults in electricity grid elements. Our team have developed a drone, capable to carry combination of sensors at the same time, designed to fly slow and at low altitude for higher data quality and inspecting up to 300 km per day. THRUST drones are capable to fully substitute walking inspector crew and helicopters for infrastructure inspections at a fraction of a cost. Furthermore, our drones emit 171 times less CO2 per km than helicopters, and 10 times less than cars. Our drones have potential to cut EU CO2 emissions by 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 annually. With the help Women TechEU we will prepare for the next fundraising round, expand our innovation partner network and launch a media campaign to encourage more women to join aviation industry. This project objective is to position our company to be the catalyst for higher women involvement in aviation industry, through leading by example, as well as increasing THRUST scalability to become leading deep-tech start-up in drone-based infrastructure inspections.

Keywords: drones,electricity grid,inspection,remote sensing,uav
Constraints and Opportunities for Horizontal Gene Transfer in Bacterial Evolution (HorizonGT)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Panel description: For all organisms : Ecology, biodiversity, environmental change , evolutionary biology, behavioural ecology, microbial ecology , marine biology, ecophysiology, theoretical developments and mod elling
Countries involved: Spain
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2022-STG, 2022)
Start date: 2023-03-01
End date: 2028-02-29
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1497613.0
EU funding (EUR): 1497613.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) –the movement of genetic material between individuals– is a significant force fueling bacterial evolution. Through HGT, bacteria acquire new traits, develop new metabolic capabilities and learn to withstand harsh environmental conditions. However, in some cases, HGT brings genetic information that is not advantageous to its host. Despite its crucial relevance for bacterial ecology and evolution, understanding the selective forces that drive the success (or failure) of HGT remains a major challenge. Previous studies addressing this challenge ignored the fact that not all HGT events are alike: incoming DNA can be integrated into the host genome (e.g., transposons, integrons), or it can stand as a physically separated, autonomous DNA molecule (e.g., plasmids). This difference in genomic context poses several mechanistic constraints that are likely to alter the evolutionary outcome of HGT. Here, I will present a conceptually novel approach that explicitly considers genomic context to uncover the selective drivers of HGT in bacterial populations. First, I will develop a new genetic technology to obtain high-throughput fitness measurements of thousands of HGT events. Then, I will use these data to identify and quantify the constraints that determine the success of HGT, both considering the intrinsic effects of the transferred DNA and the role of genomic context on host fitness. Specifically, I will measure the fitness effects of genetic transfers mediated by plasmids (Obj. 1) or integrated into the chromosome and, in the latter case, in different regions of the chromosome (Obj. 2). Finally, I will leverage the rules derived from these analyses to reconstruct the role of HGT in the evolution of a relevant human pathogen (Obj. 3). This project will provide a quantitative and mechanistic understanding of the selective forces driving HGT, expanding horizons in evolutionary microbiology.

Keywords: horizontal gene transfer,plasmids,fitness costs,chromosomal organization
SARS-CoV-2-induced activation of pathogenic endogenous retrovirus envelope HERV-W: towards personalized treatment of COVID-19 patients (HERVCOV)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Health
Theme: Health
Destination: Tackling diseases and reducing disease burden
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: France,Greece,Italy,Spain,Croatia
Call: Personalised medicine and infectious diseases: understanding the individual host response to viruses (e.g. SARS-CoV-2) (HORIZON-HLTH-2021-DISEASE-04, 2021)
Start date: 2022-07-01
End date: 2027-06-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 6846157.0
EU funding (EUR): 6846157.0
Participants: 9
Project status: SIGNED

Severe COVID-19 disease and the high frequency of its long-term complications are now a major health problem worldwide. Due to the significant heterogeneity of COVID-19 disease profiles, biomarkers that allow either the identification of patients at high risk for developing severe forms of COVID-19 and its long-term complications, or guide personalized treatment options, are scarce. The HERVCOV project aims to analyze the role of human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs), known for their high pro-inflammatory potential, in the immunopathogenesis of COVID-19 and to identify and evaluate a set of biomarkers which will be important for the diagnosis, prognosis and follow-up of COVID-19 patients and their prioritization for targeted therapy. Recent data from the consortium has demonstrated that HERV-W envelope protein is highly expressed in lymphocytes of COVID-19 patients and correlates with inflammatory markers and respiratory outcome of the disease, strongly suggesting the role of HERVs in COVID-19 pathogenesis. The project aims to assess the biological pathways and functions that underlie the association of HERV expression and activation with severe COVID-19 forms and related complications. Biomarkers based on HERV pathogenic protein activation, SARS-CoV-2-specific immune responses, cytokine production and mandatory medical blood analyses for COVID-19 clinical monitoring will be studied in samples from different forms of COVID-19: acute, post- neuro- and long-COVID patients. Parameters will be determined that predict the clinical course of the disease and aggravation of SARS-CoV-2-induced symptoms and allow potential clustering of different bio-clinical profiles of COVID-19 patients. Diagnostic and prognostic panel(s) ?translated? from our fundamental research and subsequent evaluations of HERV-associated biomarkers will be assessed to define novel indicators in precision medicine-based therapeutic strategies, leading to individualized medical treatment in COVID-19.

Keywords: covid 19 long covid endogenous retrovirus,herv w pathophysiology inflammation biomarker monoclonal antibody therapeutic personalized medical treatment
Extragalactic stellar streams as astrophysical tools to decipher dark matter (EXTRADARK)

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: Physics
Countries involved: Denmark
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2022 (HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01, 2022)
Start date: 2023-12-15
End date: 2025-12-14
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 230774.4
EU funding (EUR): 230774.4
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Stellar streams are sensitive to both the distribution of dark matter and the population of dark matter subhalos in galaxies, which both vary depending on the nature of the dark matter particle. In galaxies beyond the Milky Way, extragalactic systems, we can apply a hierarchical inference approach, where we draw from expected distributions to look at thousands of stellar stream properties in a statistical sense. My proposed research will lay the theoretical groundwork and fill the missing gaps in our knowledge of streams in external galaxies to prepare for the wealth of incoming stellar stream data materializing over the next decade from the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and Euclid. The objectives of this proposal is: 1) to map where the missing thin stellar streams from globular clusters, which are most sensitive to perturbations from subhalos, are located in external galaxies, 2) to develop tools to recover dark matter potentials from stellar streams in external galaxies, and 3) to place constraints on dark matter substructure through statistical analyses of streams and underdensities in dwarf galaxies. To achieve these objectives, I will analyze publicly released catalogs of globular cluster formation and evolution models, develop numerical techniques to model multiple streams at once in external galaxies, and run state-of-the-art Nbody simulations of disrupting globular clusters in dwarfs. This work will facilitate direct comparisons between upcoming data and models from various dark matter particle candidate predictions. My proposed work provides a fundamental method of mapping the otherwise invisible dark matter, and will impact the interdisciplinary direction of dark matter research, in both particle physics and astrophysics.

Keywords: stellar streams,dark matter halo,dark matter subhalos
Building Invariant Representations: Computational Innovations for Cryo-ET Data Analysis (CryoYeTi)

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: Information Science and Engineering
Countries involved: France
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024 (HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01, 2024)
Start date: 2026-09-01
End date: 2028-08-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 226420.56
EU funding (EUR): 226420.56
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Cryo-Electron Tomography (Cryo-ET) is a powerful technique that allows observing the 3D structure of biological molecules in their native cellular environment, and as such, has a unique promise to transform our understanding of biology at the mesoscopic level. Currently, its full impact is constrained by the difficulties associated with interpreting the 3D tomograms in terms of the molecular reality they represent (the so-called assignment problem), which mainly happens due to low resolution and noise inherent to the method. Our research goal is to develop innovative and highly efficient computational tools that will help to overcome the existing challenges and help to address the assignment problem. We shall achieve this goal by building invariant representations of 3D volumetric data that will allow us to significantly speed up the processing of tomograms and expand the scale and accuracy of the analysis that can be performed. This mathematical foundation will allow us to strengthen both template-based and template-free approaches to the assignment problem, addressing the critical weaknesses of the current state of the art, specifically, the high computational costs of the former and dependence on scarce training data of the latter. To demonstrate the whole capacity of our approach, we shall apply it to novel tomograms of highly important whole-cell biological samples obtained by our experimental collaborators. This highly multidisciplinary project (math+computation+biology) rests on the unique theoretical/computational competencies brought by the supervisor and the candidate, and involves a key experimental collaboration, bolstering the exchange of scientific knowledge. The planned training of the candidate in mathematical/algorithmic methods, the peculiarities of the Cryo-ET data, and key transversal skills will strengthen his profile as a specialist in integrative molecular modeling and ensure a successful transition to the next career stage.

Keywords: cryo electron tomography rotational invariants polynomial expansions spherical harmonics fast fourier transform algorithms methods development whole cell analysis