University of Cambridge

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-08

The proposal brings together expertise across the UK in modelling and measuring agri-food supply chain systems. We have developed collaborative approaches using a digital laboratory exploring supply chain configurations capable of analysing the existing fragmentary approach to food system resilience. The lab involves the creation of a highly collaborative and participatory approach to agrifood supply chains, involving interdisciplinary co-development across the biological sciences, engineering and management disciplines. Our stakeholder partners include organisations across the UK end-to-end food supply chain, who are willing to share confidential data, allowing us to integrate what have become disconnected silos of information and knowledge capable of disrupting a given food system. Our particular focus is on the balance between home (UK) production and imports, and how this may change based on cascading risks resulting from disruptions associated with economic, socio-political or climatic issues. The proposal involves the creation of an interactive lab that enables exploration of multiple scenarios involving cascade risks, and potential mitigation interventions. The lab environment will model implications of cascade risks and potential interventions, including unintended consequences. Risks considered for the food system include changes in consumer demand, retailer alternative sourcing, biosecurity, government policy, overseas conflict, flood or drought, which produce dramatic changes in the economic cost of production or future investment in infrastructure, mechanisation and labour. From the perspective of the consumer, in addition to product availability, choice, and safety, the proposal investigates factors impacting economic hardship, and nutritional insecurity and associated health problems. Our approach draws on multiple data sets from contributory stakeholders and disciplines along an entire food system. Firstly, our novel digital laboratory will apply an integrated model (first developed for Pharma) to analyse the impact of cascading risks along well documented food supply chains. Secondly, we will combine advances in visual analytics, gamification, Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) and System Dynamics Modelling (SDM) to capture the interfaces and pinch points along that supply chain, and evaluate the cumulative impact of risks (be it for UK/International sourcing, or from climate change and economic scenarios). A third work package will then explore real world scenarios, using examples of UK fruit and vegetable supply, as well as alternative protein sources, and demonstrate how advanced modelling can predict the impact of a combination of risk events, and yet sustain consistency in supply through alternative routes. Fourthly, we will then provide predictive solutions for generic supply chains, by adopting the intervention-based research method, involving defining a specific challenge, identifying interventions and designing a mitigation strategy. This will combine both digital and experimental (field work) approaches, leading to an associated outcome analysis (both desired and anomalies). We submit that the application of engineering principles based around digital supply chain modelling, when applied to real-life fruit and vegetable food supply systems, will offer a unique and insightful approach. The combination of UK academic and international commercial stakeholder inputs will ensure that outputs have broader world-wide relevance. The programme will allow scenario planning that can cope with cascading risks, suggesting alternative sourcing strategies which will maintain resilience to match supply and demand, avoiding unintended consequences for key players in another part of the supply chain. Overall, project RA(SC)2AL-(Resilience in Agrifood Systems: Supply Chain Configuration Analytics Lab) will develop novel reconfiguration and reorientation options for food supply networks centred in the UK.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-08

The formation of protein condensates has recently emerged as a fundamental process in cell physiology, but also as a hallmark of several devastating diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and cancer. Yet, how protein condensates are regulated in physiological and pathological contexts is largely unknown. Most recent studies have focused on investigating the interactions between protein condensates and other biological macromolecules, such as nucleic acids, lipids, and cytoskeletal structures, and have overlooked the regulatory roles of small molecules. The distinct chemical milieu within protein condensates likely allows to selectively recruit specific small molecules to the condensed phase, but their interplay is as of now poorly understood. With this work, I seek to investigate this "dark matter" of protein condensates, by combining microfluidic-based ultrahigh-throughput screens with biophysical, biochemical, and cell biological assays. Understanding how protein condensates are regulated and how they interact with other cellular components will not only provide crucial insights into fundamental physiological processes, but also into the pathogenesis of widespread human diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, paving the way for the development of novel therapeutic opportunities. Our current inability to efficiently prevent or delay these pathologies, together with the ageing of the population, will cause an enormous social and economic burden. Thus, understanding protein condensate regulation is an imperative and urgent challenge.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-08

Communication networks that use the quantum properties of photons and matter for transferring data are fundamentally more secure than traditional networks and will become indispensable in the coming era of quantum information processing. The fundamental building block for such a quantum network is a node where flying photonic qubits and stationary matter qubits can exchange information efficiently and with high fidelity. While multiple prospective platforms exist, semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) stand out owing to their optical properties: they are the brightest and most coherent quantum emitters in the solid-state. Remarkable improvements of electronic- and nuclear-spin coherence in QDs recently put forward by the applicants have further strengthened the case for placing this system as the focus of a concerted effort towards a device capable of a full hardware stack demonstration. We propose to combine the expertise of multiple research groups with complementary skills and foci to achieve an all-in-one device delivery: a semiconductor QD system capable of producing entanglement between a matter qubit and a photonic qubit and storing this information with 90% fidelity for 100 milliseconds, a 105 improvement over previous QD-based results. We will deliver this with tailored and theory-guided QD growth and post-growth control to optimise optical and spin properties, which we will verify in spectroscopic measurements. We will integrate such a QD device with (1) a strain-engineering platform - allowing tuning of the interaction between an electron spin qubit and a nuclear register; (2) an optical micro-cavity - allowing efficient photon coupling; and (3) radiofrequency antennas - allowing dynamical decoupling of the nuclear spin register for 100 ms. Each academic member of our consortium has produced multiple results on the above foundational elements either separately or within bi-/tri-lateral informal collaborations; this project will provide the resources to bring members together and leverage their existing resources to produce a unique and highly impactful quantum device demonstration. An industrial partner, with expertise on wafer-scale heterogeneous integration, will contribute to the development of scalable fabrication processes. MEEDGARD's success would have direct ramifications for future investment in semiconductor-based quantum networking.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-07

The internal organisation of the cell nucleus is one of the great marvels of physical chemistry. Besides housing a giant DNA-based polymer named chromatin, our nucleus is filled with thousands of proteins, RNAs, and metabolites. Transformative experiments in the past decade have proposed that chromatin and its associated biomolecules exploit the physical chemistry of phase transitions to form multi-component chromatin-rich nano-droplets inside the nucleus-termed condensates. This new paradigm conceives the nucleus as an emulsion of functionally diverse condensates: each containing a distinct chromatin region and microenvironment-a unique collection of biomolecules, metabolites, and thermodynamic parameters- to favour precise chemical reactions on the chromatin. Controlling the formation and physical properties of these condensates is hypothesised to contribute to the tight regulation of gene function in the nucleus. The question is: how? ChromatinDroplets aims to: (1) Develop a radical computational approach to achieve the first simulation of chromatin-rich condensates with many components using molecularly accurate coarse-grained models of chromatin with deformable nucleosomes, multi-domain proteins, and RNAs. Atomistic simulations, bioinformatics, and experimental data will inform our models. (2) Use our approach to answer: How does chromatin transform the physical properties of multi-component condensates? How do condensates modulate chromatin structure? What are the parameters and mechanisms that drive chromatin condensates out of equilibrium? (3) Realise the first nonequilibrium simulation of model transcriptional condensates at sub-molecular detail, while they proceed through the stages of transcription. This alone is ground-breaking because it will reveal how the activity of condensates shapes their fundamental physical properties. This approach is new and original but solidly grounded in my earlier work.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-07

Our computing infrastructure is fundamental to modern society, but it is fundamentally flawed: exploitable errors expose all of us to continual risk of malicious attack, at every level from the individual to the nation-state. Industry test-and-debug development cannot check all execution paths of these incredibly complex systems, and hence cannot ensure the absence of bugs. This is especially important for systems software: the operating systems and hypervisors that use the underlying hardware-architecture mechanisms (virtual memory, etc.) to protect running programs from each other, as flaws in these let attacks spread. This long-standing problem has prompted research in formal verification and analysis, as machine-checked proof _can_ provide high assurance of correctness and security, but research has lagged behind mainstream engineering, unable to handle the subtleties and scale of real architectures and systems code. Recent work has taken big steps towards this in several directions: we now have full-scale instruction-set semantics, models for many aspects of user and systems concurrency, and sophisticated reasoning methods - but we still do not have an integrated mathematical definition of the allowed behaviour of systems code for any mainstream architecture, or proof and analysis tools above it. The high-level challenge that we now face, and that SAFER targets, is to integrate and extend those disparate advances to produce usable full-scale mathematical models of real-world architectures; to develop analysis and verification techniques above them that can be used in practice for real-world systems software; and to enable transfer of these techniques into more widespread use in industry, complementing existing practice with mathematical specifications, methods, and assurance. Ultimately, this is the only way to establish a substantially more robust and secure computing infrastructure, to truly make us safer from malicious attack on our data and systems

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-07

When plants are repeatedly exposed to particular biotic or abiotic stresses, they can learn to respond more efficiently to subsequent challenge, in a process known as priming. Priming involves changes in epigenetic modifications that impact the 3D structure and organization of the genome, influencing the expression pattern of many genes. Primed genes have an enhanced transcriptional responsiveness upon repeated exposure to stress, while returning to baseline levels expression in between stresses. These genes are thought to remain in 'primed' or 'poised' state, with an altered chromatin landscape that facilitates hyper-induction upon a recurrent stress event, such as a pathogen attack. Variation in cellular responses between tissues and cell-types affects the outcome of plant- pathogen interactions. Yet, the tissue-specific epigenetic modifications facilitating cellular memory, leading to a cell-type-specific transcriptional response have not been previously described. This project aims to implement cutting edge genomic and transcriptomic methods to characterize the pathogen primed state on a tissue-specific resolution. This will grant a previously inaccessible and unbiased insight into the tissue specific nature of plant stress responses, allowing key molecular factors and the exact tissues they play a role in to be identified. With this knowledge, I will recreate the primed state by synthetically positioning defense-associated chromatin marks strictly in the relevant cell-type at selected loci. This will be achieved by driving a novel CRISPRbased epigenome engineering system called SunTag-SDG2 under a tissue-specific promoter. Cell-type-specific deposition of epigenetic marks at potential memory genes will allow me to artificially recreate the pathogen primed state in naïve plants, without exposure to stressors, minimizing negative pleiotropic effects. Development of these tools will open the door to novel, non-GM, approaches for agricultural improvement.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-07

Paleolithic stone tools offer an invaluable source of evidence for comprehending the behavior and evolution of Pleistocene hominins and Holocene modern humans. By examining their morphological properties and technological characteristics, we gain insights into various aspects, ranging from the evolutionary trajectory of human cognition to changes in diet, social systems, and landscape utilization. It's essential to remember that every stone tool ever crafted was intended for use by the human (or early hominin) hand, making the understanding of musculoskeletal aspects related to effective and safe tool usage critical in interpreting what these technologies reveal about early humans. Currently, testing these hypotheses is challenging due to the limited availability of published data on the ergonomic relationship between stone tool features and the biomechanical and morphological aspects of the human hand. To address this gap, the PALEOERGO project proposes a scientific approach that combines experimental archaeology with cutting-edge techniques in archaeological research. The project aims to tackle long-standing questions concerning the ergonomic relationship between the human hand and the use and production of stone tools. Employing a groundbreaking biomechanical perspective, the PALEOERGO project focuses on Lower and Middle Paleolithic stone tool artifacts. Through ergonomic theory and a large-scale experiment, this research endeavor seeks to establish a biomechanically grounded baseline for understanding stone tool use. By doing so, it provides a deeper understanding of the human experience with these ancient tools and sheds light on the behavior and capabilities of our early ancestors.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-07

Symmetries are an essential aspect of almost all fields in modern day physics. Conventional symmetries are described by groups, and allow us to understand the classification of phases of matter in terms of symmetry breaking. The discovery of topological order in the late 80s challenged this paradigm, and more general mathematical structures were required to classify these exotic phases. Nowadays it is understood that these topological phases of matter are in fact also characterized in terms of symmetry breaking, with the catch that one has to use an appropriately generalized notion of symmetry. These symmetries which do not necessarily act on the full space and are not necessarily invertible are mathematically described using category theory. Using insights from quantum information theory and the language of tensor networks it is possible to explicitly represent these generalized symmetries in lattice models. With this language we were able to construct a general theory for duality in 1+1D quantum lattice models, establishing equivalences between seemingly unrelated theories. In this proposal, I aim to further generalize this point of view to higher dimensions, where many open questions regarding dualities remain. The language of generalized symmetry provides a new way to tackle old problems such as conformal invariance and integrability in lattice models, and has the potential to provide a rigorous basis for duality transformations in quantum field theory.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-07

Before therapies are made available for general use in the population, they are typically evaluated in clinical trials to determine that they are safe and effective. A main driver in the statistical design of such trials is to ensure they can provide definitive answers for decision-making. Clinical trials are usually expensive, and the full developmental process can take several years before a new successful therapy is able to reach most patients. In many settings, such as life-threatening rare diseases, there is a strong desire to allocate patients to a potentially superior intervention as soon as possible (i.e., during the trial itself). A useful approach to incorporate this additional goal into a clinical trial in such settings is to use a response-adaptive design. These designs skew the allocation of patients in favour of new interventions as long as they are showing promise during the trial. However, by possibly assigning more patients to an intervention during the trial, the study could also result in a lower level of evidence collected on all other interventions, which in turn could hinder the delivering definitive answers to the efficacy question. Response-adaptive designs are not new and have been proposed with the aim to deliver patient benefit within a trial while preserving integrity of the final evidence. However, key statistical and practical questions remain over the best approach to ensure that a trial using a response-adaptive design has a high probability of definitively answering if an intervention is effective (without requiring unrealistically large sample sizes to do so). Additionally, any new method that increases the chances of finding a definitive answer after a response-adaptive design would still need to ensure statistical integrity when no intervention is effective. The latter challenge is even greater if trials last for a long time period and important variables in the patients' characteristics change over time (as is the case in platform trials). This project will develop novel statistical methods to maximise the probability to identify efficacious interventions when using a response-adaptive design that offers patients in the trial a higher chance of receiving the superior intervention. This will provide valid analysis methods for clinical trials that offer the flexibility needed to enable patients within trials to expect a better outcome than in a traditional design with fixed allocations per intervention. We will also ensure these methods preserve validity even under changing temporal conditions. To ensure that the methods we develop are widely disseminated and have maximum impact on clinical trial practice, we will provide open-source software and recommendations for the use in practice of the produced methods. The recommendations and guidance will take input from a workshop with key stakeholders including statisticians with expertise in adaptive trial designs, clinicians, clinical trialists, relevant regulatory bodies and patient representatives

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-07

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) infection is a major cause of disease in infants infected in utero and also in immunosuppressed solid organ and bone marrow transplant patients. The cost associated with treating HCMV disease has placed this virus as one of the highest priorities for vaccine development. A defining feature of HCMV is that while healthy people initially infected with the virus recover quickly, the virus is never cleared from the body, instead it establishes a lifelong latent infection capable of reactivating in the future. Over 60% of the world population is currently infected with HCMV and, therefore, carrying the virus. Consequently there is a high risk of primary infection, reinfection and reactivation of latent HCMV in vulnerable patient groups. Reactivation is particularly problematic in the organ transplant setting where the immune-suppression required to stop organ rejection can allow the virus replicate and cause disease due to loss of immune control. While there are a number of current drug therapies which target HCMV lytic virus replication, patients often develop drug resistance and 20-35% of all transplant patients are still at risk of multi-organ disease with significant morbidity and mortality. With over 100,000 solid organ transplants performed each year this represents a substantial burden on an already stretched NHS transplant programme. Our long-term goal is that understanding the viral and immunological mechanisms that control the various stages of the virus lifecycle (latency, reactivation and lytic replication) have the potential to advance our understanding of how the virus can survive in the host and what a good immune response against HCMV looks like. This knowledge could help the design of better targeted treatments of HCMV which will have significant medical benefit to patients in addition to financial benefits to the NHS in a variety of clinical settings.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-07

My overarching goal within this proposal FEBPV is to significantly enhance light-harvesting capability of cyanobacteria in biohybrid systems, by integrating non-native fluorescence protein (FP) as newly introduced light harvesting antenna, with in vivo photosystems in cyanobacteria. The spectral selectivity and sensitivity of cyanobacterial photosystem (PS) will be tuned by localized self-assembly of FPs within the cellular system, based on the rational genetic design and manipulation. The FPs expressed within the cell would work as key component that absorb and transfer solar energy to facilitate photosynthetic electron transport chain (PETC). The platform technology established from FEBPV project could greatly contribute various fields, not only for electricity generation in biophotovoltaic (BPV) system, but also for production of high-value biochemicals (H2, organic molecules, etc.) by modifying metabolic pathway based on rational biosynthetic design. Consequently, on the basis of transdisciplinary approaches, a novel solar energy conversion platform will be developed, which will represent a breakthrough in cyanobacteria-inorganic biohybrid systems.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

The Problem Children arrive into primary school classrooms with a broad range of cognitive, sensory or behavioural abilities, which may support or reduce their access to education. Efforts at researching this diversity have thus far taken an individual-focussed approach in which children are taken (singly) from classrooms for detailed in-person assessment with a highly trained individual (e.g. speech and language therapists). Not only is this disruptive to teachers and students, but these approaches are expensive, laborious and limit the reach of research. Often the children who are most at risk of educational difficulties are the hardest to reach with this approach. It is increasingly recognised that the use of small, unrepresentative samples limits the scope of research studies in school settings. Individual assessments are often pen-and-paper tasks with a fixed set of stimuli, which do not adapt to individuals’ performance, and provide coarse measures of children’s existing knowledge (e.g. vocabulary) rather than learning abilities. Our interest in this problem arises in the context of assessing speech, hearing and language abilities in primary school classrooms. However, the same issues will arise for assessing a range of other capacities including memory, executive functions and social cognition. The introduction of web-based experiments have enabled collection of high-quality behavioural datasets at scale with adults. They allow recruitment of diverse populations, with self-guided and individually adaptive tasks. However, there are many challenges of remote testing with children or special populations, including ensuring they are engaging with the tasks. In addition, for tasks involving sound presentation, variability in individual’s technical equipment (e.g. headphones) can impact their access to the stimuli. Our Solution We aim to provide research infrastructure and novel methods for assessing sensory, cognitive and behavioural abilities in classroom-based research studies that can operate at an unprecedented scale (e.g. collecting data from all children in a school in days rather than weeks). This project aims to establish and test a supervised, online whole-classroom approach to data-collection of hearing and speech processing skills that will be modifiable for other researchers to use in other domains. The approach will also allow us to develop individually adaptive testing, giving insight into children’s speech, language and listening skills. What we will do We will develop computerised adaptive tasks measuring basic auditory perception, auditory/audio-visual speech perception and the speed/accuracy of word recognition with the aim of testing whole classrooms of children simultaneously. We will develop a framework for supervised web-based testing including embedding our data collection within science engagement sessions. We will determine the feasibility of simultaneous whole classroom testing with 5-6 year olds by working with several primary school classes and obtaining teacher and pupil feedback on our approach. How this will help Our long-term goal is to establish, validate and disseminate these innovative methods; providing open source cognitive tests that can be modified and extended by other researchers, including individually adaptive tasks, for precise measurement of children’s abilities. We will also provide guidance on delivery, including a science engagement framework for embedding data collection, and hardware/software recommendations. This will enable other researchers to adopt this approach to conduct efficient, minimally disruptive, large-scale data collection with diverse samples, accessing less-advantaged children whose parents/carers might not normally sign up to research studies. These activities will benefit researchers and, ultimately, the schools and pupils that they research.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

Heart attacks are one of the most common causes of death in the UK. Heart attacks happen when the blood vessels supplying the heart are blocked by a blood clot. A major factor in blood clots is cells called platelets. These cells are activated by damaged blood vessels. People at risk of heart attacks often have platelets that are already partly activated. We suggest that this is because there is already some blood vessel damage in the heart, even before the heart attack happens. The partly activated platelets are most likely to make a dangerous clot and increase the risk of a deadly clot. In this project we will study how small clots - ones too small to cause symptoms - can partly activate platelets and increase the risk of a larger dangerous clot.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

Multi-Resonant Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescent (MR-TADF) molecules are a new class of luminescent materials based on an alternating nitrogen/boron framework. MR-TADF molecules show two distinct photophysical properties compared to conventional fluorescent molecules: 1) extremely narrow emission bandwidth, 2) fast exciton spin-flip process. These properties make them ideal candidates for next-generation emitters for vivid and energy-efficient OLED displays. Since MR-TADF is a new photophysical process, our current knowledge on the origin of their narrow emission and spin-flip process is limited, making it difficult to design new MRTADF molecules with desired emission properties. In this proposal, we aim to unravel the exciton-spin-phonon coupling of MR-TADF molecules to fully understand the MR-TADF photophysics and design new MR-TADF molecules to develop high-performance OLED devices. The research fellow's expertise in MR-TADF materials and device fabrication will synergize with the host group's expertise in ultrafast spectroscopies, fostering an effective collaboration.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

In this proposal, we will develop novel biocatalytic reactions using Fe and alpha-ketoglutarate dependent enzymes (aKGs). We will exploit the mechanistic diversity of these enzymes to design reactions that are exceptionally challenging for traditional chemical catalysts. In particular, we will transform aKGs into a synthetically useful platform for the production and derivatisation of saturated N-containing heterocycles, such as aziridines and pyrrolidines. These compounds are of great interest for the pharmaceutical industry and sustainable, contemporary methods to produce them are scarce. We will achieve this goal with a multifaceted, interdisciplinary approach: we will first perform screenings to study the limits of the promiscuity of recently discovered natural enzymes capable of performing the desired transformations, using homologs and artificial mutants. On the other hand, we will use mechanistic insight to manipulate the reaction outcomes and favour certain unnatural pathways to imbue the desired functions into selected aKGs that have never been used for that purpose, achieving novel cyclisation reactions with completely unprecedented structural scaffolds. With robust methods for the production of these heterocycles in hand, we will further showcase the synthetic potential of aKGs by using them to derivatise the heterocycles. For instance, we will seek to perform C-H halogenation reactions to enable further synthetic elaboration in the future via chemoenzymatic cascades.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

There is an ever pressing need to develop clean and green methods for energy generation. Fusion is an important part of the solution, in principal at least providing close to unlimited high grade energy with a close to zero carbon footprint. Fusion is at a cross-roads, the physics is well understood but the engineering still needs a great deal of effort to bring about practical fusion. High Temperature Superconductors (HTS) have recently emerged as a serious contender for achieving this goal. The purpose of this project is to overcome the major difficulty of AC losses which are a perennial problem with HTS. HTS are only lossless under DC conditions, this will not be the case with a fusion magnet which will be ramped up and down. In a reactor there are coils which need to be ramped rapidly this will induce AC losses. AC losses are a perennial problem for superconductors which needs to be solved. Once it is solved a huge range of applications will become practical, not only fusion but, for example electric flight, even more powerful wind generators and many more. We aim to solve this problem.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

Zoonotic pathogens can infect many different species, including sometimes humans, and they are capable of causing outbreaks that area threat to public health worldwide. Q-fever, caused by the bacterial pathogen, Coxiella burnetii is of particular importance in the UK and India due to its wide host animal range, increased prevalence and adverse effects on farming communities. This bacterial infection is present in most UK cattle herds, for example, but very few farmers are aware of this and the general public even less so. Outbreaks of Coxiella are likely to become increasingly common due to climate change as this bacteria can be spread easily in dry and dusty conditions that are becoming increasingly common in UK and India. Coxiella causes significant economic losses to farmers because it causes miscarriages and poor reproductive health in many livestock species (not only cows, but also sheep and goats). Interestingly, birds, including chickens, can be infected with Coxiella but do not get sick, for reasons that are not clear. Infected animals can pass the bacteria to humans, especially those that work with livestock. Indeed Q-fever was first described as an outbreak in an Australian abattoir in the 1930's. Despite the ability of Coxiella to infect multiple species, very little is known about how livestock species detect and respond to the infection. Since basic biological studies investigating host interactions with Coxiella and relevance of epidemiological data are lacking we have developed a collaborative UK-India partnership by combining expertise in immunology, Coxiella burnetii biology, veterinary sciences, policy and awareness initiatives. For this we have assembled a team in UK and India who have highly complementary expertise in all the appropriate areas required to deliver this research. Powered by our collective experience in advanced genetic engineering tools, this project aims to define how different domestic animal species detect and respond to the Coxiella burnetii bacteria. We will use this study to understand more about the immune system of livestock animals, including cows, goats, sheep and chickens, and learn the differences between how cells from these different species respond to Coxiella infection. We hope to use that information to understand some of the factors that determine how and why some species suffer more severe disease outcomes than others and use that information to rationally design therapeutics in the future. As part of this study we will also engage with public health leaders to help farmers and the general public to understand the prevalence of Coxiella in livestock herds and how Q-fever outbreaks occur and may be increased by the threat of more dry and dust environmental conditions due to climate change.

Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé · FY 2023-2024 · 2023-04

Volet: Formation de maîtrise; Domaine: Neurosciences, santé mentale et toxicomanies; Objet: Apprentissage et mémoire; Objet: Capteurs et dispositifs; Application: Santé; Application: Fondements biomédicaux de la santé humaine; Mots-clés: MEMOIRE, CONSOLIDATION SYSTEMIQUE, OSCILLATIONS NEURONALES, THALAMUS, NOYAUX THALAMIQUES MEDIANS, FUSEAUX DE SOMMEIL

Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture · FY 2023-2024 · 2023-04

Volet: Bourses de doctorat en recherche; Domaine: Relations internationales et développement; Objet: Contextes politiques; Objet: Conflits armés; Application: Politique; Application: Affaires intérieures; Mots-clés: CONSOLIDATION DE LA PAIX (PEACEBUILDING), CONFLITS ARMES, AUTORITARISME, INTERVENTION INTERNATIONALE, GOUVERNANCE, ETAT POST-CONFLIT

Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture · FY 2023-2024 · 2023-04

Volet: Bourses postdoctorales; Domaine: Enjeux fondamentaux et finalités de la vie humaine; Objet: Épistémologie et méthodologie; Objet: Fondements de la pensée scientifique; Application: Science and Technologies; Mots-clés: EPISTEMOLOGIE, PHILOSOPHIE DES SCIENCES, PHILOSOPHIE DE L'HISTORIOGRAPHIE, THEORIES DE LA JUSTIFICATION, CONCEPTS COLLIGES, REFLEXIVITE EN HISTOIRE DES SCIENCES

Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture · FY 2023-2024 · 2023-04

Volet: Bourses postdoctorales; Domaine: Nature, transformation et gouvernance de la société et des institutions; Objet: Contextes idéologiques, politiques, économiques et sociaux des transformations sociales; Objet: Systèmes religieux; Mots-clés: POLITICAL THEOLOGY, REFORMATIONS, TUDOR IRELAND, SOVEREIGNTY, CONVERSION, CONFESSIONALIZATION

Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé · FY 2023-2024 · 2023-04

Volet: Formation de doctorat; Domaine: Nutrition et métabolisme; Objet: Maladies hépatiques; Objet: Imagerie; Application: Santé; Application: Fondements biomédicaux de la santé humaine; Mots-clés: IMAGERIE QUANTITATIVE MULTI-PARAMETRIQUE, STEATOHEPATITE NON-ALCOOLIQUE, DIAGNOSTIC NON-INVASIF, IMAGERIE PAR RESONANCE MAGNETIQUE, APPRENTISSAGE MACHINE, BIOPSIE HEPATIQUE

Other NSERC · FY 2024

Apprentissage, Mémoire, Sommeil, Consolidation systémique, Oscillations neuronales, Thalamus, Noyaux thalamiques médians, Fuseaux de sommeil, Optogénétique, Électrophysiologie

Other NSERC · FY 2024

Antibiotic Development, Nucleic Acid Technologies, Biologic Therapeutics, Bionanotechnology, Biological Chemistry, Post-transcriptional Gene Regulation, Engineered DNA Enzymes, Drug Resistant Bacteria