Proyectos

Roughly 30% of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement (PA) include land-based mitigation measures, however, there significant uncertainties remain regarding their effectiveness for delivering negative emissions. Aside from the expected inability of all current NDCs to deliver on the goal to below 2 oC goal, the uncertainty caused by this...

At the time of writing of this proposal, most European countries have imposed lockdowns to combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which have forced many industries, businesses and transport networks to either close down or drastically reduce their activity. Such economic interruption, which is unprecedented in many ways, is resulting in a sudden drop of atmospheric...

Modeling the heartbeat is a highly complex task that involves several scales and different tightly coupled problems. A large number of spatial orders of magnitude are linked, from the microscopic cell arrangement into a volumetric description, to the macroscopic shape of the cardiac chambers. In the same way, several temporal scales coexist, from...

Technological advances in experimental biology provide us with an astounding amount of various molecular and clinical data describing different aspects of the functioning of the cells. These complex big data carry biomedical information that is currently hidden from us within their large sizes and complexities. Hence, some of the foremost computational challenges that the...

Over the last decade we have made significant progress in understanding the role of genetics in cancer predisposition, evolution andtreatment. We now have thousands of germline variants associated with different types of cancer and we have also identified a fewhundred genes that, when somatically mutated, drive the growth of cancer cells.However, there are also many open...

Gene expression determines the identity of cells and it thus governs the process by which organs and tissues are formed and organized in an individual. Furthermore, differences in gene expression between individuals are known to play a crucial role in determining disease risk. However, the mechanisms of how such differences in gene expression are associated with disease...

Air pollution continues to be one of the main issues in urban areas. In the particular case of Barcelona (Spain), chronic NO2 and PM2.5 exceedances are still recorded in urban traffic stations, highlighting the contribution of the road transport sector to population exposure to ambient concentrations. At the same time, several studies have shown that the urban plume of...

The mesopelagic layer of the oceans, also known as the Twilight Zone, extends between ~200 and 1000 m depth and is one of the vastest contiguous ecosystems on Earth. It plays a pivotal role in global biogeochemical cycles and climate, and hosts a massive biomass of zooplankton and small fish. However, scientific understanding and predictive capacity of biogeochemical...

In this project, we present PluriZymes, enzymes containing multiple (engineered) catalytic actives sites in a single scaffold, as one of the next breakthroughs in enzymatic catalysis. We show clear preliminary evidence of the potential role of PluriZymes in optimizing complex biochemical processes, such as cellulose degradation, or to group cascade reactions into one single...

Digital twins, along with the Internet of Things and Edge computing , are expected to play a decisive role in the nextdecade s industrial markets (Industry 4.0) enabling dramatic improvements in complex systems design and operation.However, this technology has not been yet widely implemented, since it requires the collaboration of experts in multiple fieldsand costly...