Three Radboud researchers are set to receive a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).
The ERC Consolidator Grant is designed to support researchers at the stage in which they aim to set up their own independent research team and research programme. The Consolidator Grant is worth up to two million euros.
PhaseShape
Coacervate-Controlled Membrane Remodelling and Connecting of Synthetic Cells, Evan Spruijt
Membranes are crucial for the functioning of living cells. They enclose and protect the cell and organize the cellular machinery in subcompartments. Membrane proteins regulate the transport of molecules entering and exiting the cell, which is essential to maintain homeostasis and produce the energy required for life. However, membranes also introduce major challenges to create synthetic cells with life-like properties or interfacing them with live cells. Without complex transport proteins, vesicle-based synthetic cells cannot take up nutrients, excrete waste, communicate and stay alive. Moreover, connecting synthetic cells into functional tissues with controlled communication and mechanical properties has proven difficult. Emerging evidence shows that phase-separated condensates in the cell are involved in a wide range of functional interactions with cellular membranes, leading to transmembrane signalling, membrane remodelling and exocytosis.
Spruijt’s project aims to develop coacervate protocells with dynamically controlled properties that are capable of similar functional interactions in synthetic cells. The coacervates proposed here have three vital functions: (1) supply nutrients and biomolecular machinery via permeabilization or endocytosis; (2) reshape synthetic cells allowing for budding and division; and (3) connect cells into tissues with tunable properties and controlled communication. Key to these coacervates is the ability to dynamically control their interaction with membranes and physicochemical properties, which we achieve via active (bio)chemical reactions established in our group.
Controlling this unique coacervate-membrane interface will be a gamechanger for building viable and reconfigurable synthetic cells and tissues by opening up new opportunities for delivery, remodelling and signalling, and provide a fundamental, physicochemical understanding of condensate-membrane interactions in biology .
COCONUT
Developing Correct Concurrent Software Using Types, Robbert Krebbers
Modern computer programs carry out many tasks at the same time, which is essential to enable the processing of massive data sets and to serve many clients and users simultaneously. Concurrent computer programs are amongst the hardest programs to get right because concurrent tasks can be executed in many different orders. In computer science, that makes it a challenge to determine whether concurrent programs enjoy properties such as "certain actions will eventually be performed" (in other words, the program will stop responding) or "private data cannot leak" (in other words, the program is resilient to hackers).
In the COCONUT project, Robbert Krebbers will develop the foundations of a new generation of programming languages to enable the development of correct and secure concurrent programs. His vision is that these new programming languages will prevent programmers from making large classes of mistakes and therefore automatically ensure that fundamental properties (such as those mentioned above) hold by construction. Krebbers aims to achieve this goal by combining and extending results from programming language theory, concurrency theory, compilers, security and mathematical logic.
Krebbers is an expert in the correctness and security of concurrent programs. In 2023, Krebbers and collaborators received the " Alonzo Church Award ", which is awarded annually by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM SIGLOG) and the European organizations for logic in computer science (EATCS, EACSL and the Kurt Gödel society) to researchers who have made influential contributions to logic in computer science over the past 25 years. He will be the program chair of the European Symposium on Programming (ESOP) 2026 and an associate chair of the leading ACM Conference on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) 2026.
CR-INTERFEROMETRY
Air shower interferometry to advance astroparticle physics, Harm Schoorlemmer
The universe hosts a population of subatomic particles with astonishingly high kinetic energies, so-called cosmic rays. Where and how they obtain this energy is unknown. These particles initiate cascades of particles in the atmosphere called air showers. The particle interactions within air showers are not fully understood and probe a regime not easily accessible by particle accelerator experiments.
Schoorlemmer developed a new technique that applies interferometry on the radio emission from air showers. It improves the reconstruction accuracy of air shower properties and hence allows for better determination of the features of cosmic particles. The largest facility for ultra-high-energy cosmic ray detection, the Pierre Auger Observatory, is upgrading its infrastructure to include 1660 radio antennas. This grant facilitates the interferometric technique for the upgrade by deploying an accurate synchronisation system. The Southern Wide-view Gamma-ray Observatory is a next-generation facility, starting construction in 2026. This It pioneers the interferometric air shower reconstruction on a large scale and will pave the way for its use in future projects.
By improving the air shower reconstruction of these facilities, the researchers aim to extend their capabilities to address major open questions in astroparticle physics. Specifically, the combination of particle detection and interferometry is used to reach these objectives:
- Determine which particles contribute to the cosmic-ray flux at the highest energies, by measuring air shower depth.
- Accurately measure the hadronic interactions in air showers, by simultaneously detailed observations of the muon and electromagnetic components of air showers. The same technique is applied over a wide cosmic-ray energy range.
- Observe astrophysical photons with energies above 1015 eV, to identify the most extreme particle accelerators in our galaxy.
