Project acronym INTICE
Project Pathways to Intrinsically Icephobic Surfaces
Researcher (PI) Dimosthenis Poulikakos
Host Institution (HI) EIDGENOESSISCHE TECHNISCHE HOCHSCHULE ZUERICH
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), PE8, ERC-2014-ADG
Summary Icing of surfaces is common in nature and technology, affecting everyday life and often causing catastrophic events. Despite progress in recent years in the area of hydrophobicity, engineered surfaces that can be employed in applications based on their intrinsic icephobicity, going beyond classical additional chemical coatings or heating treatments, are not a reality. Understanding and counteracting surface icing brings with it significant scientific challenges, which form an intersection of nucleation thermodynamics, interfacial thermofluidics and surface nanoengineering/science. This project will investigate important mesoscale phenomena (a term used here to summarily describe phenomena manifesting themselves in the spatial range from the order of a nanometer to a hundred microns), which affect the behavior of water on surfaces with respect to icing. With the resulting, unifying knowledge base, the aim is to identify pathways for the design and fabrication of a new class of intrinsically icephobic surfaces, based on their a-priori engineered composition and texture. Our aim is to identify anti-nucleation and anti-wetting phenomena, leading to surfaces having long ice nucleation time scales, low water contact and retention, and low ice adhesion. The effects of surface texture curvature on ice nucleation, local liquid confinement on freezing point depression, and mesoscale texture features on interfacial thermofluidics, have intertwined and sometimes counteracting impacts on surface icing behavior, which we aim at unraveling, to determine pathways to high performance surfaces. Connected to all this is the employment of advanced surface texture fabrication and methods to perform the necessary experiments, lending consideration to the development of such surfaces for future applications. Beyond icephobicity, this research has clear implications to the characterization of mesoscale phase change phenomena, for multiphase heat and mass transfer processes and devices.
Summary
Icing of surfaces is common in nature and technology, affecting everyday life and often causing catastrophic events. Despite progress in recent years in the area of hydrophobicity, engineered surfaces that can be employed in applications based on their intrinsic icephobicity, going beyond classical additional chemical coatings or heating treatments, are not a reality. Understanding and counteracting surface icing brings with it significant scientific challenges, which form an intersection of nucleation thermodynamics, interfacial thermofluidics and surface nanoengineering/science. This project will investigate important mesoscale phenomena (a term used here to summarily describe phenomena manifesting themselves in the spatial range from the order of a nanometer to a hundred microns), which affect the behavior of water on surfaces with respect to icing. With the resulting, unifying knowledge base, the aim is to identify pathways for the design and fabrication of a new class of intrinsically icephobic surfaces, based on their a-priori engineered composition and texture. Our aim is to identify anti-nucleation and anti-wetting phenomena, leading to surfaces having long ice nucleation time scales, low water contact and retention, and low ice adhesion. The effects of surface texture curvature on ice nucleation, local liquid confinement on freezing point depression, and mesoscale texture features on interfacial thermofluidics, have intertwined and sometimes counteracting impacts on surface icing behavior, which we aim at unraveling, to determine pathways to high performance surfaces. Connected to all this is the employment of advanced surface texture fabrication and methods to perform the necessary experiments, lending consideration to the development of such surfaces for future applications. Beyond icephobicity, this research has clear implications to the characterization of mesoscale phase change phenomena, for multiphase heat and mass transfer processes and devices.
Max ERC Funding
2 498 043 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-11-01, End date: 2020-10-31
Project acronym MaGic
Project The Materials Genome in Action
Researcher (PI) Berend Smit
Host Institution (HI) ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FEDERALE DE LAUSANNE
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), PE8, ERC-2014-ADG
Summary It is now possible to make an enormous spectrum of different, novel nanoporous materials simply by changing the building blocks in the synthesis of Metal Organic Frameworks (MOF) or related materials. This unique chemical tunability allows us to tailor-make materials that are optimal for a given application. The promise of finding just the right material seems remote however: because of practical limitations we can only ever synthesize, characterize, and test a tiny fraction of all possible materials. To take full advantage of this development, therefore, we need to develop alternative techniques, collectively referred to as Materials Genomics, to rapidly screen large numbers of materials and obtain fundamental insights into the chemical nature of the ideal material for a given application. The PI will tackle the challenge and promise posed by this unprecedented chemical tunability through the development of a multi-scale computational approach, which aims to reliably predict the performance of novel materials before synthesis. We will develop methodologies to generate libraries of representative sets of synthesizable hypothetical materials and perform large-scale screening of these libraries. These studies should give us fundamental insights into the common molecular features of the top-performing materials. The methods developed will be combined into an open access infrastructure in which our hypothetical materials are publicly accessible for data mining and big-data analysis. The project is organized in three Work Packages, each centered around finding better materials for carbon capture: (1) screen materials for gas separations and develop the tools to predict the best materials for carbon capture; (2) gain insights into and develop a computational methodology for screening the mechanical properties of nanoporous materials; (3) achieve an understanding of the amine-CO2 chemistry in diamine-appended MOFs and use this to predict their performance.
Summary
It is now possible to make an enormous spectrum of different, novel nanoporous materials simply by changing the building blocks in the synthesis of Metal Organic Frameworks (MOF) or related materials. This unique chemical tunability allows us to tailor-make materials that are optimal for a given application. The promise of finding just the right material seems remote however: because of practical limitations we can only ever synthesize, characterize, and test a tiny fraction of all possible materials. To take full advantage of this development, therefore, we need to develop alternative techniques, collectively referred to as Materials Genomics, to rapidly screen large numbers of materials and obtain fundamental insights into the chemical nature of the ideal material for a given application. The PI will tackle the challenge and promise posed by this unprecedented chemical tunability through the development of a multi-scale computational approach, which aims to reliably predict the performance of novel materials before synthesis. We will develop methodologies to generate libraries of representative sets of synthesizable hypothetical materials and perform large-scale screening of these libraries. These studies should give us fundamental insights into the common molecular features of the top-performing materials. The methods developed will be combined into an open access infrastructure in which our hypothetical materials are publicly accessible for data mining and big-data analysis. The project is organized in three Work Packages, each centered around finding better materials for carbon capture: (1) screen materials for gas separations and develop the tools to predict the best materials for carbon capture; (2) gain insights into and develop a computational methodology for screening the mechanical properties of nanoporous materials; (3) achieve an understanding of the amine-CO2 chemistry in diamine-appended MOFs and use this to predict their performance.
Max ERC Funding
2 486 720 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-11-01, End date: 2020-10-31
Project acronym PROTEOMICS4D
Project Proteomics 4D: The proteome in context
Researcher (PI) Rudolf Aebersold
Host Institution (HI) EIDGENOESSISCHE TECHNISCHE HOCHSCHULE ZUERICH
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), LS2, ERC-2014-ADG
Summary Elements operating in the context of a system generate results that are different from the simple addition of the results of each element. This notion is one of the basic tenants of systems science. In systems biology/medicine complex (disease) phenotypes arise from multiple interacting factors, specifically proteins. Yet, the biochemical and mechanistic base of complex phenotypes remain elusive.
An array of powerful genomic technologies including GWAS, WGS, transcriptomics, epigenetic analyses and proteomics have identified numerous factors that contribute to complex phenotypes. It can be expected that over the next few years, genetic factors contributing to specific complex phenotypes will be comprehensively identified, while their interactions will remain elusive.
The project “Proteomics 4D: The proteome in context “explores the concept, that complex phenotypes arise from the perturbation of modules of interacting proteins and that these modules integrate seemingly independent genomic variants into a single biochemical response. We will develop and apply a generic technology to directly measure the composition, topology and structure of wild type and genetically perturbed protein modules and relate structural changes to their functional output.
This will be achieved by a the integration of quantitative proteomic and phosphoproteomic technologies determining molecular phenotypes, and hybrid structural methods consisting of chemical cross-linking and mass spectrometry, cryoEM and computational data integration to probe structural perturbations.
The project will focus initially on the structural and functional effects of cancer associated mutations in protein kinase modules and then generalize to study perturbed modules in any tissue and disease state. The resources supporting this technology will be disseminated to catalyze a broad transformation of biology and molecular medicine towards the analysis of the proteome as a modular entity, the proteome in context.
Summary
Elements operating in the context of a system generate results that are different from the simple addition of the results of each element. This notion is one of the basic tenants of systems science. In systems biology/medicine complex (disease) phenotypes arise from multiple interacting factors, specifically proteins. Yet, the biochemical and mechanistic base of complex phenotypes remain elusive.
An array of powerful genomic technologies including GWAS, WGS, transcriptomics, epigenetic analyses and proteomics have identified numerous factors that contribute to complex phenotypes. It can be expected that over the next few years, genetic factors contributing to specific complex phenotypes will be comprehensively identified, while their interactions will remain elusive.
The project “Proteomics 4D: The proteome in context “explores the concept, that complex phenotypes arise from the perturbation of modules of interacting proteins and that these modules integrate seemingly independent genomic variants into a single biochemical response. We will develop and apply a generic technology to directly measure the composition, topology and structure of wild type and genetically perturbed protein modules and relate structural changes to their functional output.
This will be achieved by a the integration of quantitative proteomic and phosphoproteomic technologies determining molecular phenotypes, and hybrid structural methods consisting of chemical cross-linking and mass spectrometry, cryoEM and computational data integration to probe structural perturbations.
The project will focus initially on the structural and functional effects of cancer associated mutations in protein kinase modules and then generalize to study perturbed modules in any tissue and disease state. The resources supporting this technology will be disseminated to catalyze a broad transformation of biology and molecular medicine towards the analysis of the proteome as a modular entity, the proteome in context.
Max ERC Funding
2 208 150 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31
Project acronym ReaDMe
Project Readout of DNA methylation
Researcher (PI) Dirk Schubeler
Host Institution (HI) FRIEDRICH MIESCHER INSTITUTE FOR BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH FONDATION
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), LS2, ERC-2014-ADG
Summary DNA and chromatin modifications are essential for proper control of gene expression during development. How these marks alter transcriptional programs and modulate binding patterns of sequence specific transcription factors (TF) remains poorly understood. This currently limits our interpretation of epigenomic maps towards their incorporation into predictive models of gene regulation.
ReaDMe has the ambitious goal to systematically define the sensitivity of TFs to local levels of DNA methylation in vivo. We will use a combination of genomics, genome editing and proteomics tools to comprehensively identify transcriptional regulators that respond to DNA methylation. As a first approach, we will interrogate changes in the global TF binding landscape when DNA methylation is ablated from the genome. Using both embryonic stem cells and somatic cells, these experiments are aimed at identifying sites that are occupied by TFs in a DNA methylation dependent manner within different cellular context. Secondly, we will combine parallelized chromosomal insertions with targeted footprinting to determine the link between DNA sequence context, methylation density and TF binding. In a third approach we will define the global chromatin proteome as a function of DNA methylation. Through the use of a novel and orthogonal proteomics assay, we will characterize DNA methylation sensitive changes in the chromatin-bound proteome. Candidate factors predicted from all approaches will be validated and functionally characterized through direct genome-wide mapping as well as loss of function analysis.
ERC funding would enable ReaDMe to develop an integrated setup to in vivo identify and characterize where DNA methylation influences the cis-regulatory landscape by modulating binding profiles of trans-acting factors. This goal represents a crucial step towards comprehensive understanding of the genomic readout of DNA methylation and its impact on gene regulation.
Summary
DNA and chromatin modifications are essential for proper control of gene expression during development. How these marks alter transcriptional programs and modulate binding patterns of sequence specific transcription factors (TF) remains poorly understood. This currently limits our interpretation of epigenomic maps towards their incorporation into predictive models of gene regulation.
ReaDMe has the ambitious goal to systematically define the sensitivity of TFs to local levels of DNA methylation in vivo. We will use a combination of genomics, genome editing and proteomics tools to comprehensively identify transcriptional regulators that respond to DNA methylation. As a first approach, we will interrogate changes in the global TF binding landscape when DNA methylation is ablated from the genome. Using both embryonic stem cells and somatic cells, these experiments are aimed at identifying sites that are occupied by TFs in a DNA methylation dependent manner within different cellular context. Secondly, we will combine parallelized chromosomal insertions with targeted footprinting to determine the link between DNA sequence context, methylation density and TF binding. In a third approach we will define the global chromatin proteome as a function of DNA methylation. Through the use of a novel and orthogonal proteomics assay, we will characterize DNA methylation sensitive changes in the chromatin-bound proteome. Candidate factors predicted from all approaches will be validated and functionally characterized through direct genome-wide mapping as well as loss of function analysis.
ERC funding would enable ReaDMe to develop an integrated setup to in vivo identify and characterize where DNA methylation influences the cis-regulatory landscape by modulating binding profiles of trans-acting factors. This goal represents a crucial step towards comprehensive understanding of the genomic readout of DNA methylation and its impact on gene regulation.
Max ERC Funding
2 136 969 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2020-12-31
