Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR

In 2014, NANO-D had funding from two ANR programs:

• ANR Jeunes Chercheurs Jeunes Chercheuses (JCJC): 340,000 Euros over three years (2011-2014). This grant has been provided to S. Redon by the French Research Agency for being a finalist in the ERC Starting Grant 2009 call, and is for two PhD students and an engineer.

• ANR Modeles Numeriques (MN): 180,000 Euros over four years (2011-2015). This project, coordinated by NANO-D (S. Grudinin), gathers biologists and computer scientists from three research groups: Dave Ritchie at LORIA, Valentin Gordeliy at IBS (total grant: 360,000 Euros).

PEPS

Sergei Grudinin participates in the Cryo-CA PEPS project. Cryo-CA (Computational algorithms for biomolecular structure determination by cryo-electron microscopy) is a 2-years project, supported by the Projets Exploratoires Pluridisciplinaires (PEPS) program in the panel Bio-Maths-Info provided by CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research). The project started on the 01/09/2012. Its main goal is to develop computational algorithms for cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM).

The partners of the Cryo-CA project are: Inria Nancy / Team Orpailleur (David Ritchie); Inria Grenoble / Team NANO-D (Sergei Grudinin); and INSERM IGBMC/ Team Integrated structural Biology (Annick Dejaegere, Patrick Schultz, and Benjamin Schwarz).

The main scientific aim of this cross-disciplinary project is to develop computational algorithms to help experimentalists and molecular modelers to solve more rapidly and accurately the structures of macromolecular complexes using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo- EM) and integrative structural biomolecular modeling techniques. More specifically, this PEPS initiative aims to address two important challenges in single particle cryo-EM, namely particle picking and multi-dimensional structure fitting. In the longer term, a further driving aim of this project is to develop strong collaborations amongst the participating teams to position ourselves for a larger project proposal to ANR or ERC.