Lanthanides (Ln) are critical raw materials and designated with a high supply risk by the European Commission. Their mining and purification have a considerable negative environmental impact and we urgently need sustainable and efficient recycling strategies for these elements. It was recently discovered that many bacteria use Ln for growth and utilize them in the active sites of enzymes. In addition, a Ln-binding protein with unprecedented affinities for Ln (Lanmodulin, LanM) has been isolated from one of these bacteria. The Ln-uptake mechanisms of these bacteria remain vastly underexplored, however, the involvement of polydentate ligands (chelators) to bind lanthanides — lanthanophores (lanthanide carriers) — has recently been established. For the first time, practical applications of chelators that were specifically designed by nature to bind, recycle and separate the technologically-indispensable lanthanides are in reach. Thus, the objective of LANTHANOPHOR is the identification and isolation of lanthanophores from the spent media of lanthanide-utilizing bacteria and the synthesis of short peptides based on the Ln-binding moiety in LanM. A comprehensive characterization of the lanthanophore including their lanthanide coordination chemistry, will contribute to our understanding how Ln are made bioavailable inside bacterial cells. The lanthanophore and the peptides will be evaluated for the use in Ln separation and recycling. I will further elucidate whether these ligands can be used in lanthanide bioremediation or for medical applications as chelators. The results of LANTHANOPHOR will advance the development of sustainable solutions and bioinspired applications that are urgently needed in the quest for new, environmentally friendly and faster Ln separation and recycling technologies. The unique combination of lanthanide biochemistry and coordination chemistry in my group opens unparalleled opportunities for discovery and characterisation of lanthanophores.

Since Heinrich Schliemann excavated the famous shaft graves at Mycenae and identified the individuals as members of Agamemnon’s royal family, archaeologists have tried to understand the social structures which materialised in the collective graves of Mycenaean Greece. Whereas today’s understanding of family ties goes well beyond biological relatedness (e.g. patchwork families), prehistoric individuals buried together and their belonging are still predominantly explained by biological models – also due to the inability to trace past biological relatedness. But now the necessary methods have been developed and we will apply them to the extraordinary archaeological richness of Mycenaean Greece with its many collective graves which will serve as a paradigmatic case study for unravelling prehistoric social complexity beyond elites. MySocialBeIng will produce and integrate comprehensive archaeological, anthropological, genetic and isotopic analyses for all individuals buried together in selected collective graves (chamber, tholos) in order to decipher the criteria for their selection and social belonging out of the dialectic interplay of biological relatedness and social practices (gender, mobility, nutrition, burial, material culture). This has only recently become possible with 1) the development of bioinformatics tools to model biological relationships, 2) single-stranded DNA library production for numerous individuals, 3) innovative pedigree-based Bayesian modelling of 14C dates and 4) novel datasets of bioavailable strontium in Greece. The results will have a major impact on Mycenaean archaeology and on archaeology as a discipline by establishing a ground-breaking new approach to the study of past social relations. Moreover they will be relevant for the social sciences in general as well as for society, allowing us to fully understand the complexity of social belonging in the human past and thus helping to overcome the 19th-century “biological bias" of belonging.

The question of how an isolated quantum mechanical system thermalizes is not only significant in condensed matter physics, but it also invokes the intriguing problem of the apparent loss of information in a complex system as it thermalizes. A curious case is when a complex system fails to thermalize altogether -- a phenomenon known as many-body localization (MBL). Here, we propose to use interacting ultracold fermions in a lattice to experimentally study the distinctive properties of MBL using a novel set of observables. Among the questions in MBL debated intensely today are those concerning the existence of a many-body mobility edge, many-body intermediate phase and localization in higher dimensional lattice systems. Moreover, the striking relation between non-ergodicity and Hilbert space fragmentation is also not fully understood. In this view, our research objectives include: [1.] Stark many-body localization and Hilbert space fragmentation. We plan to study MBL in a tilted lattice, i.e., a Stark Hamiltonian and study non-ergodicity resulting from Hilbert space fragmentation. [2.] Bipartite fluctuations in an MBL system of >100 lattice sites: We propose to characterize the localization properties using bipartite fluctuations which is a proxy for the Entanglement entropy of a 1D lattice. [3.] Approximate theories for fermionic MBL systems: Due to the exponential Hilbert space dimension of an interacting many-body system, studying their properties numerically is also exponentially hard. We plan to use a quantum simulator with >100 lattice sites develop efficient approximate theories to describe these systems. The aforementioned projects are easily accessible to the current experimental capability and they will enhance our general understanding of MBL physics. Moreover, they also include a step towards developing ultracold atoms in a lattice into a quantum simulator, capable of solving hard problems.

Infectious diseases kill millions of people worldwide every year. Decades of research have revealed important insights into the molecular mechanisms pathogens employ to establish lasting infections, yet little is known about what renders individual pathogens within a microbial population more successful at establishing an infection than others. Recent advances in single-cell technologies have started to revolutionize modern biology, unveiling an enormous degree of cell-to-cell heterogeneity. Often, phenotypic variability is not caused by genetic changes in the DNA sequence, but by epigenetic changes in the structural organization of DNA called chromatin. In multicellular organisms, this epigenetic plasticity plays a key role in developmental processes and cancer. In unicellular pathogens, cell-to-cell heterogeneity is hypothesized to promote the establishment of infections by allowing the pathogen to adapt to changing environments or evade the host immune response. To decrease the burden of infectious diseases, it is therefore, necessary to better understand how infections are enabled by cellular heterogeneity at the chromatin level of the pathogen. Several limitations have previously challenged this endeavor, including small genome size (i.e. low signal-to-noise) and the lack of knowledge of how chromatin is organized in pathogens. Cell2Cell proposes to overcome these barriers by bringing together (1) experts in pathogen biology; (2) the use of unicellular yeast species to serve as chromatin models; (3) single-cell technologies; (4) bioinformatics tools. Using state of the art technologies, we will train early stage researchers to identify the molecular mechanisms that control cell-to-cell heterogeneity in pathogens. The proposed research will contribute to the elucidation of how heterogeneity affects the outcome of diseases and give rise to highly skilled scientists that are well prepared to face the demands of modern genomics research in academia and industry.