VALENCIA, 26 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Two researchers from the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) in the Valencian Community have obtained two projects financed by Europe with 18 million.
And they have done so within a call from the European Research Council (ERC), the main funding body for science in Europe, which has just awarded its Synergy Grants for excellent research projects that require international scientific collaborations.
In this call, two CSIC researchers in centers in the Valencian Community have obtained two projects to develop their studies. Alberto Marina, from the Institute of Biomedicine of Valencia (IBV-CSIC), will check whether phages and other mobile genetic elements have ‘social behavior’. Víctor Borrell, from the Institute of Neurosciences (IN), a joint center of the CSIC and the Miguel Hernández University of Elche (UMH), coordinates a project to address the complex issue of cortical folding during embryonic development from multiple points of view. In total, both projects have received 18 million, the CSIC reports in a statement.
Alberto Marina, CSIC research professor at the IBV, is an expert in Structural Biology. He studies signaling systems that microorganisms use to communicate with each other. This is one of the burning questions in Biology: the last Princess of Asturias Research Award recognized the work of pioneers in the study of communication between bacteria in the 90s. It was recently discovered that the viruses that infect them, the phages , are also capable of communicating with each other with a system called arbitrium, which was thought to be limited to their progeny.
These systems have also been found in plasmids and other mobile genetic elements, DNA molecules capable of being transferred between microorganisms. “In our project we want to verify the extension of this communication system,” explains Alberto Marina. “We have data that propose that communication through arbitrium is not limited to a phage with its offspring, but would allow it to communicate with other phages or, even more interesting, with other mobile genetic elements,” he says.
According to Marina, confirming this would mean a paradigm shift. “It would change our view of phages and other mobile genetic elements, giving them social capabilities and changing our perception of viruses as selfish elements whose only function is to multiply.”
Analyzing the social behaviors generated by communication through arbitrium, in addition to its biological and evolutionary implications, requires a multidisciplinary study. To do this, Alberto Marina’s team has joined forces with microbial genetics expert José R. Penadés (Imperial College of London), and Avigdor Eldar (Tel Aviv University), an expert in microbial ecology and evolution. His project is endowed with 8.5 million euros for 6 years, of which 2.7 million are destined for the Navy team at the IBV-CSIC.
“If we understand how phages and plasmids communicate with each other, as well as their function in the ecology with their hosts, bacteria, we could use this communication for biomedical or biotechnological purposes,” reveals the CSIC researcher. This knowledge opens a new field of study that in the future could be very useful in multiple fields such as phage therapy against antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the so-called ‘superbacteria’, or the design of plasmids that could control pathogenic bacteria or modify others for industrial purposes.
Víctor Borrell is a research professor at the CSIC and leads the Neurogenesis and Cortical Expansion laboratory at the Institute of Neurosciences (CSIC-UMH), where he carries out fundamental research on the embryonic development of the brain, in particular on its growth and folding. This is a characteristic of the human brain that, when it fails, leads to very serious learning and intellectual problems. It is known that the folding of the cerebral cortex requires the participation of multiple types of stem cells and cell migration processes, controlled by complex developmental genetic programs.
The mechanical properties of embryonic brain tissue play a central role in its folding, but taken together, it is key that mechanics, cell biology and genetics influence each other in a constant and dynamic way. The project that Víctor Borrell coordinates with this Synery Grant, called UNFOLD, will address the question of cortical folding from all these points of view, with a special interest in understanding its complexity. The results of the experiments will be framed in a global computational model that researchers will use to ask new questions and find answers.
The researcher, who already obtained a Starting Grant from the ERC in 2012, highlights the importance of this achievement: “Being beneficiaries of the Synergy Grant, the most competitive and best-funded call for European science, represents great support for the activity we do. and to consolidate our leadership in this field by being coordinated by the Institute of Neurosciences”.
Borrell’s group will be joined by laboratories led by Kristian Franze, director of the Institute of Medical Physics and Microtissue Engineering at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin (both in Germany), and a pioneering researcher. in the field of brain mechanobiology; Laurent Nguyen, elected scientific director of the GIGA Center at the University of Liège (Belgium); and Roberto Toro, director of the Applied and Theoretical Neuroanatomy Unit of the Pasteur Institute (France). In total, the UNFOLD project has been endowed with 10.8 million euros, of which 2.8 million are for the Institute of Neurosciences.
Borrell highlights that, thanks to the Synergy Grant, the four laboratories will pool different capabilities and knowledge to address research fields that have traditionally been ignored. The result of this union is a multidisciplinary team made up of specialists in cell biology, brain evolution, physical sciences and computational models, which will generate complete atlases of all cell types, genetic expression programs, and mechanical forces throughout brain development. “Together we will reveal the mysteries of what the interaction between physics and biology is like to give rise to the development and shape of living organisms,” says Borrell.
The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded 37 projects for a total value of 395 million euros in the Synergy Grants 2023 call, to which 395 proposals were submitted. 4 of these funded projects involve the CSIC, of ??which 2 are developed in CSIC centers of the Valencian Community.
