ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The overall goal of 14Constraint is to enhance the availability and use of radiocarbon data as constraints for process-based understanding of the age distribution of carbon in and respired by soils and ecosystems. Carbon enters ecosystems by a single process, photosynthesis. It returns by a range of processes that depend on plant allocation and turnover, the efficiency and rate of litter decomposition and the mechanisms stabilizing C in soils. Thus the age distribution of respired CO2 and the age of C residing in plants, litter and soils are diagnostic properties of ecosystems that provide key constraints for testing carbon cycle models. Radiocarbon, especially the transit of ‘bomb’ 14C created in the 1960s, is a powerful tool for tracing C exchange on decadal to centennial timescales. 14Constraint will assemble a global database of existing radiocarbon data (WP1) and demonstrate how they can constrain and test ecosystem carbon cycle models. WP2 will fill data gaps and add new data from sites in key biomes that have ancillary data sufficient to construct belowground C and 14C budgets. These detailed investigations will focus on the role of time lags caused in necromass and fine roots, as well as the dynamics of deep soil C. Spatial extrapolation beyond the WP2 sites will require sampling along global gradients designed to explore the relative roles of mineralogy, vegetation and climate on the age of C in and respired from soil (WP3). Products of this 14Constraint will include the first publicly available global synthesis of terrestrial 14C data, and will add over 5000 new measurements. This project is urgently needed before atmospheric 14C levels decline to below 1950 levels as expected in the next decade.

2 283 747 €

Start date: 2016-12-01, End date: 2021-11-30

This research will create a new theoretical vision of the importance of marriage as an agent of transformation in human sociality. Marriage globally is undergoing profound change, provoking intense debate and anxiety. These concerns refract wider instabilities in political, economic, and familial institutions. They signal the critical role of marriage in bringing together - and separating - intimate, personal, and familial life with wider state institutions. But we have little up to date comparative research or general theory of how marriage changes or the long-term significance of such change. Paradoxically, social scientific and public discourse emphasise the conservative and normative aspects of marriage. This underlines the need for a new theoretical frame that takes account of cultural and historical specificity to grasp the importance of marriage as both vehicle of and engine for transformation. AGATM overturns conventional understandings by viewing marriage as inherently transformative, indeed at the heart of social and cultural change. The research will investigate current transformations of marriage in two distinct senses. First, it will undertake an ethnographic investigation of new forms of marriage in selected sites in Europe, N. America, Asia, and Africa. Second, it will subject ‘marriage’ to a rigorous theoretical critique that will denaturalise marriage and reintegrate it into the new anthropology of kinship. Research on five complementary and contrastive sub-projects examining emerging forms of marriage in different locations will be structured through the themes of care, property, and ritual forms. The overarching analytic of temporality will frame the theoretical vision of the research and connect the themes. The resulting six monographs, journal articles, and exhibition will together revitalise the study of kinship by placing the moral, practical, political, and imaginative significance of marriage over time at its centre.

2 297 584 €

Start date: 2017-01-01, End date: 2022-06-30

The proposed project aims at investigating the molecular mechanisms that activate B cell antigen receptor (BCR) signalling in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL). While it is widely accepted that the unbroken BCR expression in CLL cells is indicative for a key role in disease development, the mechanisms that induce BCR activation and survival of malignant cells are still elusive. Using a unique reconstitution system, we have recently shown that CLL-derived BCRs possess the exceptional capacity for cell-autonomous signalling independent of external antigen. Crystallographic analyses confirmed our model that CLL-BCRs bind to intrinsic motifs in nearby BCRs on the very same cell. In addition to the BCR, several pathogenic factors influence the biological behaviour of CLL cells, but the functional hierarchy and the effect on BCR signalling are insufficiently understood. Here, we aim at investigating the structural cause of autonomous signalling as well as the characterization of important signalling pathways and their mechanistic action in CLL pathogenesis. By combining crystallography with the measurement of autonomous signalling of wild type and mutated receptors in our unique reconstitution system, we will generate a structure-function relationship for CLL-BCRs. By generating new animal models and by employing classical as well as cutting-edge approaches of biochemistry and molecular/cellular immunology, we will comprehensively characterize the signalling pathways that are activated by autonomous signalling and might be important for CLL pathogenesis. These systematic efforts are necessary to understand how various biological mechanisms operate and ultimately activate downstream pathways that result in a lymphoproliferative disease. In addition, a cohesive model of CLL pathogenesis, which elucidates the hierarchical order of pathogenic factors and their interaction with BCR signalling, may well lead to novel disease-specific preventive or therapeutic intervention.

2 256 250 €

Start date: 2016-11-01, End date: 2021-10-31

Speciation is a central process in evolution that involves the origin of barriers to gene flow between populations. Species are typically isolated by several barriers and assembly of multiple barriers separating the same populations seems to be critical to the evolution of strong reproductive isolation. Barriers resulting from direct selection can become coincident through a process of coupling while reinforcement can add barrier traits that are not under direct selection. In the presence of gene flow, these processes are opposed by recombination. While recent research using the latest sequencing technologies has provided much increased knowledge of patterns of differentiation and the genetic basis of local adaptation, it has so far added little to understanding of the coupling and reinforcement processes. In this project, I will focus on the accumulation of barriers to gene exchange and the processes underlying increasing reproductive isolation. I will use the power of natural contact zones, combined with novel manipulative experiments, to separate the processes that underlie patterns of differentiation and introgression. The Littorina saxatilis model system allows me to do this with both local replication and a contrast between distinct spatial contexts on a larger geographic scale. I will use modelling to determine how processes interact and to investigate the conditions most likely to promote coupling and reinforcement. Overall, the project will provide major new insights into the speciation process, particularly revealing the requirements for progress towards complete reproductive isolation.

2 499 927 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2022-02-28