ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Autonomous programmable computing devices made of biological molecules hold the promise of interacting with the biological environment in future biological and medical applications. Our laboratory's long-term objective is to develop a 'Doctor in a cell': molecular-sized device that can roam the body, equipped with medical knowledge. It would diagnose a disease by analyzing the data available in its biochemical environment based on the encoded medical knowledge and treat it by releasing the appropriate drug molecule in situ. This kind of device might, in the future, be delivered to all cells in a specific tissue, organ or the whole organism, and cure or kill only those cells diagnosed with a disease. Our laboratory embarked on the attempt to design and build these molecular computing devices and lay the foundation for their future biomedical applications. Several important milestones have already been accomplished towards the realization of the Doctor in a cell vision. The subject of this proposal is a construction of autonomous biomolecular computers that could be delivered into a living cell, interact with endogenous biomolecules that are known to indicate diseases, logically analyze them, make a diagnostic decision and couple it to the production of an active biomolecule capable of influencing cell fate.

2 125 980 €

Start date: 2009-01-01, End date: 2013-10-31

Over the past fifteen years, I have argued that the effects of context on content go well beyond what is standardly acknowledged in semantics. This view is sometimes referred to as Contextualism or (more technically) Truth-Conditional Pragmatics (TCP). The key idea is that the effects of context on content need not be traceable to the linguistic material in the uttered sentence. Some effects are due to the linguistic material (e.g. to context-sensitive words or morphemes which trigger the search for contextual values), but others result from top-down or free pragmatic processes that take place not because the linguistic material demands it, but because the literal meaning of the sentence requires adjustment or elaboration ( modulation ) in order to determine a contextually admissible content for the speaker s utterance. In the literature, one often finds arguments to the effect that, if Contextualism is right, then systematic semantics becomes impossible. More precisely, the claim that is often made is that TCP is incompatible with the Principle of Compositionality, upon which any systematic semantics must be based. The aim of this project is to defend Contextualism/TCP by demonstrating that it is not incompatible with the project of constructing a systematic, compositional semantics for natural language. This demonstration is of importance given the current predicament in the philosophy of language. We are, as it were, caught in a dilemma : formal semanticists provide compelling arguments that natural language must be compositional, but contextualists offer no less compelling arguments to the effect that « sense modulation is essential to speech, because we use a (mor or less) fixed stock of lexemes to talk about an indefinite variety of things, situations, and experiences » (Recanati 2004 : 131). What are we to do, if modulation is incompatible with compositionality? Our aim is to show that it is not, and thereby to dissolve the alleged dilemma.

1 144 706 €

Start date: 2009-01-01, End date: 2013-12-31

One of the major outcomes of recent studies on the formation of the Solar System is the reconnaissance of the fundamental importance of processes which took place during the first 10 thousands to 2 or 3 millions years of the lifetime of the Sun and its accretion disk. Astrophysical observations in the optical to infrared wavelengths of circumstellar disks around young stars have shown the existence in the inner disk of high-temperature processing of the dust. X-ray observations of T-Tauri stars revealed that they exhibit X-ray flare enhancements by several orders of magnitude. The work we have performed over the last years on the isotopic analysis of either solar wind trapped in lunar soils or of Ca-, Al-rich inclusions and chondrules from primitive chondrites, has allowed us to link some of these astrophysical observations around young stars with processes, such as irradiation by energetic particles and UV light, which took place around the T-Tauri Sun. The aim of this project is to make decisive progress in our understanding of the early solar system though the development of in situ high-precision isotopic measurements by ion microprobe in extra-terrestrial matter. The project will be focused on the exploration of the variations in the isotopic composition of O and Mg and in the concentration of short-lived radioactive nuclides, such as 26Al and 10Be, with half-lives shorter than 1.5 millions years. A special emphasis will be put on the search for nuclides with very short half-lives such as 32Si (650 years) and 14C (5730 years), nuclides which have never been discovered yet in meteorites. These new data will bring critical information on, for instance, the astrophysical context for the formation of the Sun and the first solids in the accretion disk, or the timing and the processes by which protoplanets were formed and destroyed close to the Sun during the first 2 million years of the lifetime of the Solar System.

1 270 419 €

Start date: 2009-01-01, End date: 2013-12-31

The key objective of this project is to promote cleaner and more efficient combustion technologies through the development of theoretically grounded and more accurate chemical models. This is motivated by the fact that the current models which have been developed for the combustion of constituents of gasoline, kerosene, and diesel fuels do a reasonable job in predicting auto-ignition and flame propagation parameters, and the formation of the main regulated pollutants. However their success rate deteriorates sharply in the prediction of the formation of minor products (alkenes, dienes, aromatics, aldehydes) and soot nano-particles, which have a deleterious impact on both the environment and on human health. At the same time, despite an increasing emphasis in shifting from hydrocarbon fossil fuels to bio-fuels (particularly bioethanol and biodiesel), there is a great lack of chemical models for the combustion of oxygenated reactants. The main scientific focus will then be to enlarge and deepen the understanding of the reaction mechanisms and pathways associated with the combustion of an increased range of fuels (hydrocarbons and oxygenated compounds) and to elucidate the formation of a large number of hazardous minor pollutants. The core of the project is to describe at a fundamental level more accurately the reactive chemistry of minor pollutants within extensively validated detailed mechanisms for not only traditional fuels, but also innovative surrogates, describing the complex chemistry of new environmentally important bio-fuels. At the level of individual reactions rate constants, generalized rate constant classes and molecular data will be enhanced by using techniques based on quantum mechanics and on statistical mechanics. Experimental data for validation will be obtained in well defined laboratory reactors by using analytical methods of increased accuracy.

1 869 450 €

Start date: 2008-12-01, End date: 2013-11-30