For the second consecutive year, CNRS has renewed its call for projects '80 Prime'. Created in 2019, on the occasion of the CNRS' 80th anniversary, this call promotes Inter-institute Multi-team Research Projects and aims in particular to support interdisciplinarity.

The 80 selected projects benefit from a maximum annual budget per project of 30,000 euros over two years, plus a doctoral contract over three years. They must raise new scientific and methodological questions, the implementation of which requires the setting up of unprecedented collaborations between laboratories. At least two teams from different laboratories must collaborate within each project.

Among the projects, 3 are led by researchers from ENS de Lyon:

• AIMSVQ: Asymptotic behaviour of the Sinh-Gordon model multiple integrals, Alice Guionnet (UMPA)

This project aims at studying a the large- N behaviour of class of integrals over N variables in strong interactions. Such integrals allow to express various kinds of quantities appearing in mathematical physics, for instance the correlation functions in the N -site discretisation of the 1+1 dimensional quantum Sinh-Gordon model in #nite volume. In fact, on the one hand these integrals generalise rather naturally those describing the integration over the spectrum of large random hermitian matrices while on the other one they bring into the game many new features. The study of their large- N behaviour will allow to obtain a thorough and non-perturbative characterisation of a quantum #eld theory in #nite volume. Moreover, the complete understanding of this problem would allow for an important progress in mathematics which would pave the way to the large- N analysis of new types of integrals involving integration variables in strong interaction and generalising the famous Coulomb gas models.

• BAMS: Bacteria meet surfaces: how the micromechanical environment impacts bacterial virulence, Sigolene Lecuyer (Laboratoire de physique)

[TBA]

• READGEN: Real-time adaptation of single cells to genetic changes and implications for bioprocesses, Gael Yvert (LBMC)

The way by which mutations allow living organisms to adapt their physiology is complex, dynamic and heterogeneous. It is also a fundamental process of natural evolution which can be artificially applied to improve the yields of industrial bioprocesses. We propose to exploit two technological developments (one from biology and one from physical-chemistry) that, when combined together, have the potential to monitor the phenotype of individual de novo mutant cells, in real time and at very high throughput. This development can in principle have wide applications in biology. By using it on yeast cells, we expect to reveal fine-scale properties of a basic evolutionary force (the spectrum of phenotypic possibilities generated by mutations) and to describe metabolic burden (a natural limitation of bioproduction) at unprecedented resolution.

See all 80 projects