Novel encapsulation approaches to create alternative delivery options for nutraceuticals are emerging as a promising strategy to enhance the bioavailability of poorly absorbed active food ingredients. In this context, nanoTOM aims to exploit edible plant derived nanovesicles and use them as vehicles for the encapsulation, protection, release and bioavailability enhancement of selected nutraceuticals. Plant cells secret phospholipid membrane-surrounded vesicles morphologically similar to mammalian extracellular vesicles. Exploitation of plant nanovesicles is promising although hampered by i) their difficult isolation and ii) the lack of knowledge of their biogenesis, molecular architecture, uptake and biological effects. The experienced researcher is a chemist with strong academic and pharmaceutical background in the isolation and analysis of bioactive compounds from medicinal plants who team-up with the Institute of Biosciences and BioResources (IBBR) with considerable expertise in extracellular vesicle research to realize a uniquely interdisciplinary research program. The research proposed here will realize the following concrete objectives: 1. Set-up an integrated analytical pipeline for the isolation, characterization, encapsulation, uptake and toxicological profiling of plant nanovesicles. 2. Use the pipeline to exploit different Solanum lycopersicum (tomato) nanovesicle populations regarding secretion mechanism, heterogeneity, biocargo composition, nutraceutical and encapsulation properties. Neither of these objectives have been addressed before and both have high potential to expand the knowledge in the field and to drive the research activity towards industrialization. The research objectives are integrated with concerted training objectives in plant, cellular and molecular biology and omics, outreach program, dissemination events and considerable knowledge transfer in the isolation and use of herbal nutraceuticals from the researcher to the IBBR host group.

Humans have an impressive ability to form action plans in several domains of cognition; for example, planning routes to goals in spatial navigation, or the necessary steps to assemble complex objects, alone or together with other persons. However, the computations that underlie human individual and social planning remain largely unknown. This proposal aims to explain the ways humans face three key forms of uncertainty arising in planning domains; namely, uncertainty about task structure, action sequences, and the contributions of self and others to cooperative plans. To this aim, it advances a radically new theory about human planning, within a Bayesian approach that has been successfully adopted to explain uncertainties arising in perception and control. The theory under scrutiny is that humans plan using probabilistic inference based on hierarchical predictive codes (HPCs): compressed information or task abstractions that afford a powerful form of uncertainty-minimization, by highlighting salient junction points of the problem at hand, analogous to saliency maps for visual search. The methodology will combine empirical and computational modeling methods, to systematically validate the hypotheses of HPC theory about human planning in the face of uncertainties. A cornerstone of the methodology consists in conducting model-based analyses of human participants' behavior while they solve navigation-and-building tasks, alone or in dyads. This approach will permit us to compare the predictions stemming from HPC with those of alternative planning theories and ultimately, to understand the computations that underlie human planning. This ambitious proposal will produce groundbreaking advancements in our understanding of a high-level executive function - planning - while also contextualizing it within the influential theory of predictive processing. Our results will have important implications for psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, AI and robotics.

Superfluidity and magnetism characterize a wealth of interacting fermion systems encompassing solid-state, nuclear and quark matter environments. From the interplay of these phenomena, the two following issues have been raised: Can superfluid pairing bear a mismatch in the two Fermi surfaces? Can a homogeneous fermion system become ferromagnetic via a zero-ranged interparticle repulsion? Despite decades of interdisciplinary investigations, such questions have not gotten undisputed answers so far. Here, I will experimentally address these problems with a new model system composed of ultracold fermionic Chromium and Lithium atoms with resonant interactions. The two species will mimic electrons of different spins, or quarks of different colours, but exhibiting the high degree of control of an atomic quantum simulator. In particular, two features make this system stand far beyond any other available one: the peculiar Chromium-Lithium mass ratio enables a resonant control of three-body elastic interactions on top of the usual two-body ones, together with an extraordinary suppression of atom recombination into paired states in the regime of strong interspecies repulsion. The first property greatly enhances the observability of elusive polarized superfluid regimes, such as the Fulde-Ferrel-Larkin-Ovchinnikov phase, where pairs condense in nonzero momentum states, and the Sarma or “breached pair” phase, where a homogeneous gapless superfluid coexists with unbound particles. The second makes such mixture a prime platform for the quantum simulation of Stoner’s model for itinerant ferromagnetism, whose study has been denied in nowadays experiments, where pairing instability plagues the formation of sizeable magnetic domains. I will use high-resolution imaging of the system and state-of-the-art spectroscopy schemes for disclosing such exotic phases via a thorough investigation of the phase diagrams of Fermi-Fermi mixtures with attractive or repulsive interactions.